5 teens held in boy beating

Three are charged as adults in violence after failed marijuana deal.

Three of them are charged as adults in Jupiter attack on boy, 15,

JUPITER — A Jupiter High School student looking to buy marijuana was allegedly robbed and beaten last month by five teenagers, barely a block from where an 18-year-old was killed in 2015.

The Dec. 27 armed battery on Third Street south of Indiantown Road started with a Snapchat from the 15-year-old student asking about buying marijuana, town police records show.

The would-be dealer didn’t have anything to sell, but agreed to meet up to “rip him off,” according to police records.

He and four others are accused of bashing the 15-year-old’s head with a rifle and stealing $41 from him. Three of those teens — Jeremy Exilas, 16; Maynard Fuse, 17; and Cortez Quinn, 17 — were booked Thursday on armed robbery and battery charges that were filed in the adult criminal courts. They are being held in the Palm Beach County Jail without bail.

The other two teens — one is 13; the other turned 15 on Friday — have not been charged as adults, and their names were not made public in the arrest reports. One of those two was the alleged dealer, according to redacted police records.

The five teens were arrested in Palm Beach Gardens shortly after the robbery. Police say four of the teens were taken into custody after they jumped from a rented white Ford Flex that had been stolen from a Jupiter Beach Resort guest. It is unclear where the teens found the car.

A K-9 found the fifth teen, Fuse. He claimed he’d been sleeping in the bushes when the dog “just came up and bit him,” police records state. He denied being involved with the robbery.

The other teens told police that when they showed up that December afternoon to the Jupiter neighborhood they noticed the 15-year-old had what looked like a gun in his pants pocket. Quinn was the first to grab him, records state, while Exilas is said to have hit him. Another teenager pointed a rifle at the 15-year-old and his friend and demanded money.

The teens beat the 15-year-old, witnesses told police, and tried to grab his wallet. Officers found his wallet $41 lighter than before the attack. The 15-year-old’s pellet gun lay nearby.

That teen was treated at Jupiter Medical Center for a head injury caused by someone hitting him

with the rifle. His mother told The Post that the Jupiter High School student’s hospital stay was short, though, due to medical costs.

The mother — whose husband lives in northwest Guatemala — said she now wor- ries even more when her four children leave their home, only two blocks from where her 15-year-old was attacked. The Post is not naming the woman.

“We know they could have done something much worse,” said the woman, who works in a restaurant, in Spanish.

In 2015, 18-year-old O nesimo Marcelino Lopez-Ramos fell victim to much worse only a block from last month’s attack site. He was beaten to death with an ax after a fight broke out in a Jupiter yard.

Three men, who were teenagers when Lopez-Ra- mos was killed, face first-de- gree murder charges in the killing that prosecutors have called a hate crime. They reportedly were out “Guat hunting,” a street term for robbing Hispanic men. Defense attorneys claim the attack was self-defense.

Detectives said last month’s robbery was “an isolated incident” and not racially motivated.

A relative of Exilas told The Post she wasn’t sure how the Greenacres-area teen ended up in Jupiter. Records indicate Exilas, a sophomore at Lake Worth High School, was driving the stolen car.

“He’s a good kid with the wrong group of friends, just trying to fit in,” she said.