Beating suspects are charged with hate crimes
Lingering assault on special-needs student posted on Facebook
Four young African Americans were charged with hate crimes and other felonies in Chicago on Thursday for allegedly tying up, beating and torturing a white acquaintance — a special-needs student — and livestreaming the assault on Facebook.
The half-hour video, which exploded on social media Wednesday, appears to show at least one black man torturing and taunting the 18-year-old victim and making disparaging remarks about President-elect Donald Trump.
Authorities said the victim was a friend of one of the suspects, Jordan Hill, 18, and the pair spent a day and night driving around Chicago in a stolen van before ending up at a West Side apartment, where two sisters, Brittany and Tanishia Covington, lived.
Hill allegedly tied up the victim and began a methodical, five-hour assault on him Tuesday after playful fighting turned ugly, po- lice said. “They (the female suspects) got aggravated with him, and that is when he was tied up, and the racial slurs ... started coming out,” police Cmdr. Kevin Duffin said.
The Cook County prosecutors office charged Hill of Carpentersville, Ill., along with Tesfaye Cooper, 18; Brittany Covington, 18; and Tanishia Covington, 24, all of Chicago, with aggravated kidnapping, hate crime, aggravated unlawful restraint, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and residential burglary.
Hill also was charged with robbery and possession of a stolen motor vehicle.
Duffin said the suspects told police they beat the victim, kicked him and made him drink toilet water. The video shows his scalp being cut by a knife.
Police said a downstairs neighbor threatened to report the suspects over the noise. The sisters, angered by the threat, went downstairs and allegedly kicked in the neighbor’s door, giving the victim a chance to escape.
He was spotted by police Tuesday afternoon walking along a sidewalk in cold weather wearing only sandals, jeans shorts and a tank top turned inside out and backward.
“He was bloodied, he was battered,” said officer Michael Donnelly, who came upon the victim. “He was very discombobulated, he was injured, he was confused.”
Donnelly said a check showed the victim had been reported missing by his parents, who dropped him off Saturday at a McDonald’s in the Chicago suburb of Streamwood to spend the night with Hill.
The parents told police they got text messages from someone claiming to be holding him captive and alerted police.
Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson called the actions in the video “reprehensible.” He indicated the hate crime charges were based on racial comments and disparaging comments made by the suspects regarding the victim’s mental condition.
The video was posted via Facebook Live under the account of someone named Brittany Herring and spread quickly through Twitter under the hashtag #BLMKidnapping. BLM may refer to the group Black Lives Matter, which did not appear to have any connection to the video.
Facebook removed the video from one of the suspect’s profile pages as part of the site’s policy banning the celebration or glorification of crimes.