By now you’ve probably heard the news about eight Florida teens that beat their friend senseless and filmed it to post on YouTube. Six of the teenagers were girls. The victim? A 16 year old girl.
The shocking part of the story is that they filmed the whole thing and didn’t ever realize that the film would be used as evidence against them. Now there is a chance that they might be tried as adults and could be sentenced to life in prison.
Even more shocking is their responses. At their arrests, the girls joked, “Guess we’re not going to go to the beach on this spring break,” while another one asked detectives, “Am I going to be released in time to go to cheerleading practice tomorrow?”
CNN describes the scene:
The video shows a brutal scene: The 16-year-old victim is punched, kneed and slapped by other girls. She huddles in the fetal position, or stands and screams at her attackers, but the assault continues. Authorities say the eight teens said they were retaliating for insults posted on the Internet by the attack victim.
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd called the March 30 attack “animalistic.”
Ironically, our own David R. Smith was writing a YOUTH CULTURE WINDOW article on violence when this occured. Next week you’ll see his research in that article on our front page (in the big magnifying glass).
I’m molding the CNN article into a lesson for our students. Any creative ideas or resources from the website that would flow along with it?