Cameron Knight, and Rebecca Butts

Cincinnati

Investigators are trying to piece together a timeline of events that led to the severe assault of a 16-year-old girl who died after spending two weeks in an intensive care unit.

Police said Hailey Hall was beaten by her 34-year-old boyfriend, William Arnold, sometime on Feb. 29.

Before she was admitted to the hospital that afternoon, Hailey was last seen alive and unharmed around 2 a.m. in the parking lot of Inner Circle nightclub at 4343 Kellogg Ave., said Cincinnati Police Detective Charles Zopfi.

Arnold and an unidentified individual took Hailey to Mercy West Hospital and she was later transferred to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center around 4 p.m., Zopfi said.

The St. Bernard-Elmwood Place High School 10th grader died March 14 from her injuries, police said.

Hailey's injuries included head trauma, lacerated liver, punctured and collapsed lungs, contusions, and bruises throughout her body.

"I can't think of a reason why an adult, male or female, would deserve the kind of injuries that she sustained," Zopfi said. "There is no excuse. There is no justifying anything that happened to her.”

Investigators initially charged Arnold with felonious assault and arrested him March 1. His charges have not been upgraded since Hailey's death as detectives continue to investigate the case.

"Honestly, it's devastating," Hailey's principal, Alison Gates, told The Enquirer. "No 16-year-old deserves to have her life end the way that her life ended.

"Her life was just beginning. She had so much to look forward to. She was at school. She was working hard, so it's just tragic."

Superintendent Mimi Webb said Hailey started at Elmwood Place Elementary and followed two siblings through the high school. She also had a sister who attended with her.

"She would just light up when she saw her sister in the hallway and her sister would light up, too," Gates said.

Webb said the family held a vigil for Hailey on Saturday at the elementary school. Because of her condition, her friends could not visit Hailey at the hospital.

In a school with grades 7-12 and only 540 students, educators "know all the students by name, by interest and by family," Webb said. The high school has mental health professionals on staff, and will bring in counselors from LifePoint Solution beginning tomorrow.

"She was so pretty. She was a real beauty," Webb said. "She's only 16. She should be worrying about going to prom, not anything else. We shouldn't be having a funeral."

Gates said the St. Bernard and Elmwood communities have stepped up for the students and the family.

"This is a close-knit community that has roots embedded for generations," she said. "This is a community where people know one another and they still support one another."

Webb said students at the school have come forward and asked questions, but answers are hard to come by. She explained administrators only know what police have told them.

Investigators haven't revealed much about what could have happened to Hailey before the assault. The case documents for the felonious assault charges against Arnold were pulled from the Hamilton County Clerk of Courts website.

"We are approaching this very cautiously to make sure that all of the information we've got and all of the evidence we are looking at will provide the strongest case possible in the event that this goes to the grand jury," Zopfi said.

Arnold is being held at the Hamilton County Justice Center on a $1 million bond for the felonious assault, and an additional $1 million bond related to heroin possession and trafficking charges.

Gates isn't sure what she'll say to her students.

"How do you explain this to other kids?" she asked. "How do you explain to other students and make sense of what happened? Because it doesn't make sense to me how this could happen to a 16-year-old."