You should read the order in which you've talked about the events yourself. You placed "chooses not to defend themselves" before "gets attacked" and that is precisely the order in which it happened. How could she have defended herself first? Was she to beat up a child for breaking her glasses? She instead went to the parent, which is what should have been done. Information should have been obtained to actually allow for action, which seems to be how things started off.
From there, things went bonkers, and I'm not really sure what happened to whom and in what order. The whole thing sounds odd.
I noticed two things pretty quickly in this thread:
1. People brought up illegal immigration. I'm not sure what that has to do with the incident. Cinderella is the only one in the entire ordeal who was from a foreign nation.
2. The phrase "...that Puerto Rican..." was used an odd number of times. I have no idea what the woman's origin had to do with her being rude and unreasonable.
* * *
Whether or not the child threw the ball on purpose to start the whole thing was never addressed. If they did, what was going on before that? Why would someone just randomly pick you and sock you in the face with a ball? It can happen, but it seems more likely that something was going on to make the OP a target. That's not "she deserved it," but what was the situation? We don't know. How that first interaction happened, and how it was "brought to the attention" of the mother could have had an impact on how the rest of things played out.
The employees have no real obligation to stop a fight, but they do have an obligation to cooperate with authorities in order to foster a safe environment for patrons. The police obviously had no problem taking the other person's information and she had no problem filing charges. Document everything (even keep your receipts showing you were there that day), file your own charges, and at very least sue for the glasses to start things off.
