Teen girls accused of assaulting couple arrested
Police arrested two 17-yearold girls suspected of carrying out an “unprovoked” attack on a couple near San Francisco’s Mission Dolores Park earlier this month, hospitalizing one victim with a severe eye injury and leaving both traumatized.
The girls were allegedly riding a single electric scooter on Feb. 12 when they approached the 38-year-old woman and her husband and “began assaulting them after a verbal altercation that was unprovoked by the victims,” police reported at the time. The woman suffered a fractured eye socket after the attackers grabbed her by her hair and slammed her head into the cement wall of Mission High School.
Three days after the attack, investigators assigned to the case discovered that one of the girls was in custody at the Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center for an unrelated incident, the San Francisco Police Department said in a statement Tuesday afternoon.
A detective who was investigating the girl for a different aggravated assault that occurred on Market Street in December recognized her, prior to her scheduled release from custody.
Police took the girl back into custody and transported her to San Francisco Juvenile Justice Center, where she was arrested for battery and assault, both felony charges.
Ten days later, on Feb. 25, patrol officers saw the second girl in the Mission District near the 24th Street BART Station. Officers transported her to the San Francisco Juvenile Justice Center, where she was arrested and booked for one felony charge of aggravated assault.
The assaulted couple declined to comment on the arrests Tuesday.
The attack occurred on Super Bowl Sunday as the couple walked to watch the game at a neighborhood bar. According to the couple, the two girls sped toward them on a motorized Lime scooter near the corner of 18th and Dolores streets, clipping them as the scooter passed.
The driver “threw down the scooter and started punching me repeatedly and cursing obscenities,” the husband, Matt, said in a Feb. 15 interview in which he asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of retaliation. As his wife pleaded for the attackers to stop, Matt said the second girl grabbed his wife by the hair, placed her in a headlock and slammed her head into the high school’s cement wall.
It was caught on the surveillance cameras of a nearby business. Lime, the scooter company, said it cooperated with police and quickly banned the rider who booked the scooter at the time of the attack.