200 young thugs besiege Temple U.
Students at Temple University are on edge after an unruly mob of nearly 200 minors set upon the school following a football game, assaulting and robbing people at random and, in one instance, even punching a police horse in the mouth.
The youths made their way to the streets near the north Philadelphia campus at 8:30 p.m Friday — spreading out into groups of 20 or 30 after meeting up at a movie theater.
From there, the mob split up and picked off students one-by-one — including 19-year-old Christina Lauletta, who was beaten and stomped on by 30 to 40 people.
Her father, Joe Lauletta — a 50-year-old Temple alum — later wrote on Facebook that she had been pummeled by “black teenagers,” sparking a wave of posts from users across the country who believed the attacks were racially motivated.
“Well, I haven’t been saying that because everybody is trying to get me to say it and I don’t know if I want to be that person,” Lauletta told The Post on Tuesday.
The enraged dad said the possibility of the attacks being motivated by race — perhaps as a sort of gang initiation — was part of the reason why his story was shared more than 5,000 times by people as far away as Africa.
While authorities have found no evidence so far to back up those claims, Lauletta wrote on Facebook Tuesday night that the FBI was investigating his daughter’s attack to determine whether it was, in fact, a hate crime.