16-Year-Old Boy Beaten While Attackers Yelled Anti-Gay Slurs
The victim's mother believes her son, who suffered extensive injuries, was attacked by gang members after standing up for a friend.
The mother of a 16-year-old boy says her son was stabbed and beaten by a group of teens during a vicious assault that was captured on video.
According to the victim’s mother, Frankie, who has not given her last name to protect the family from potential harassment, the teen was assaulted by a gang of people during a bonfire party on February 10 at Dockweiler Beach in Playa Del Rey, just outside Los Angeles.
Frankie says her son — whose name has not been released because he’s a juvenile — became involved in the altercation with his attackers after trying to help a friend.
Video of the attack, which was shared widely on the Internet two weeks after the incident, shows the teen covering his face while being stomped, kicked, and stabbed by at least five assailants, who yelled racial and homophobic slurs at him.
At one point in the video, blood can be seen leaking through his T-shirt.
Frankie told Los Angeles ABC affiliate KABC that her son suffered a concussion and spent days in the intensive care unit with severe injuries, including internal bleeding and a punctured lung.
“The doctor was telling me, ‘We didn’t know whether we were going to lose your son or not,'” Frankie said. “He had a tube going through his chest. They had to collapse a lung to repair the other lung. They had to take a camera in his stomach to check to see if there was anything else going on in his stomach because there was so much blood.”
Frankie says her son was not the aggressor in the fight, a detail local police confirmed to KABC.
“He’s loved everywhere,” she said. “He’s such an amazing kid that didn’t have to go through what he went through.”
The Los Angeles Police Department said some of the juvenile suspects behind the attack have been identified and interviewed by detectives, but no arrests have been reported thus far. The police department says it’s aware of the widely-circulated video, and is investigating the footage.
Although investigators have not reached any conclusions about whether the assault was a hate crime, Frankie believes it was a gang-affiliated hate crime due to some of the language used in the attack.
“They kept saying ‘on the dead homies’ while they were kicking him and stabbing him,” she told KABC.
Frankie is currently raising funds via a GoFundMe page to help cover the costs of her son’s medical expenses and to help her family relocate to avoid retaliation by gang members for cooperating with police investigators. Thus far, the page has raised more than $26,000.
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