New York Post

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.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United States