The video is chilling.
It shows three black teenagers savagely assaulting a white child on board a school bus and not one person tried to physically intervene.
The video was filmed last month on a school bus in Gulfport, Fla. It shows the teenagers throwing dozens of punches, kicking and stomping the 13-year-old as he screamed for help.
The school bus driver can be heard frantically calling a radio dispatcher for assistance.
“No, you’ve got to send somebody here quick, quick, quick,” driver John Moody said. “They about to beat this boy to death over here.”
And yet, the driver did not intervene.
The child tried to escape his attackers by trying to crawl under a seat – but the kicking and stomping continued. One of the thugs took the child’s money. The victim suffered two black eyes and a broken arm.
Police said the teenagers attacked the boy after he told school officials at their dropout prevention school that one of them had tried to sell him drugs.
Oddly, the nation’s most prominent race hustlers have gone silent. There’s been nary a peep from the “Reverend” Al Sharpton. There’s not been so much as a rhyme from the “Reverend” Jesse Jackson.
No one has called for boycotts of Disney World or orange juice. There have been no marches, no picket signs. Not one person has called the town of Gulfport an “Apartheid State.”
The bus driver has come under fire for refusing to physically intervene in the altercation. His lawyer is asking Pinellas school officials to publicly back his client for following district policies and not breaking up the beat down.
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“I want them to publicly state that we support our driver because he followed the policy,” attorney Frank McDermott told the Tampa Bay Times.
Moody told the newspaper he’d never seen a fight in his 18-year career.
“I would have had to go in there, be physical and pull the kids apart, risking the other kids’ safety, my safety,” he told the newspaper. “It was just something that couldn’t be done.”
So he simply followed district policy and watched as a child was beaten senseless.
“I probably would have been arrested for pulling kids, and who knows, they might have turned around and started punching me,” he said.
We know, it’s district policy.
Gulfport police sent the case to prosecutors to determine if Moody might face charges related to negligence. But prosecutors decided not to charge the bus driver.
In Pinellas County it’s not against the law to be a coward.
A spokesperson for the school district told me they take “student safety very seriously.”
Tell that to the 13-year-old boy who was nearly beaten to death.
They also told me they have “procedures in place to keep students safe as much as possible.”
So whose idea was it to put the victim on board a school bus with the same kids he had accused of committing a crime?
The school district did not have an answer for that question.
For whatever reason, the national media has chosen to ignore the story of three black teenagers beating a white child. There were no prime time television shows broadcasting from the courthouse lawn. There were no front-page headlines debating the state of racial relations in America. There were no clever Twitter hashtags
The attackers were not denounced on the floor of the House of Representatives. There were no moments of silence in the Senate.
There were no presidential speeches, no moments of personal reflection, no White House telephone calls to the parents of the little boy so badly beaten.
Perhaps the plight of this young man would have garnered national outrage had the circumstances been slightly different – had he been wearing a hoodie, or perhaps eating Skittles, or perhaps if he looked like the son of a president.
But that’s really a moot point – because at the end of the day we know everyone involved was just trying to follow district policy.
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