Bridgeport: Teen Youtube Beating

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roK2XIZKn8Q
By now, many of you Chicagoans have heard about the 7 teenagers that beat up and robbed an Asian high school senior this past Sunday. This is mainly because one of the teens recorded the beating with their cell phone and the video has gone viral via Youtube. The teens involved in the beating were all under the age of 18. There was one 17 year old boy, two 16 year old boys, three 15 year old boys, and a 15 year old girl. The girl allegedly lured the victim into the alley on the 2700 block of South Shields, where the boys waited to beat him. All the teens, except 17 year old Raymond Palomino, are being charged with juvenile delinquencies. While accident injury attorneys Zneimer and Zneimer do not typically handle these types of cases, they do handle personal injury cases caused by assault. Typically, insurance companies will not cover these types of acts unless the act is forseeable
Raymond is the only one of the teens being charged as an adult. His dad actually turned him in after seeing the video of the beating on the news. This viral video ended up backfiring on these teens, since many of their peers identified them via the comments on the Youtube page. Raymond is being charged as an adult with robbery and aggravated battery. His bail is set at 100,000 dollars. It seems as though Raymond is being made out as the ring leader of the group. This could be because in the video, he shouts “get him,” when the victim becomes visible. Raymond is also seen in the video removing a gym shoe from the victim’s backpack and striking him in the face repeatedly with it. He then took the victim’s wallet, removed the cash, and then dropped it into the sewer.

The victim, a senior at Curie High School, was in and out of the hospital in the same day. He was treated for bruising in his eyes, a bloody nose, cuts to his lips, and bruises to his ribs and body. Police feel the fight was not racially motivated because some of the teens beating up the boy were also Asian. It is strange however that they were shouting obscenities at the teen while they beat him, including the N-word. According to Raymond’s father, this fight was retaliation from a previous fight last October. I’m sure these teens are regretting ever posting this video to Youtube. Hopefully they are regretting being involved in the fight to begin with.

While Raymond’s father feels he is being tried unfairly as an adult, I am glad they are making an example out of him. There has been a disturbing trend of teenagers posting videos of fights to Youtube these days. Hopefully, the national attention this case has been given will make them think otherwise. Could social networking media sites be to blame for this fight? I think it definitely provided a venue that allowed the teenagers to escalate the original problem. The teenagers were all supposedly trash talking with each other via Facebook. Clearly, they recorded the fight and posted it online in an effort to be cool or gain street credibility. Luckily they did, because it greatly helped in the investigation.

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