It was like a scene straight out of the classic book Lord of the Flies. But instead of British schoolboys descending into savagery and killing each other on a bucolic deserted island, we have Chicago area schoolboys beating 16-year old honor roll student Derrion Albert to death in the South Side Roseland neighborhood last Thursday (9/24).
What’s equally as disturbing as watching children turn on children in this video is watching the savagery unfold through the eyes of the nig-norant videographer who reacts gleefully to the senseless violence as if he’s watching a video game come to life.
The video shows Derrion in the mix of a street brawl that erupted between dozens of his fellow Christian Fenger Academy High School students as school let out around 3 p.m. on Thursday.
Derrion can be seen at the 45 sec. mark swinging wildly at a teen. As he does so, another teen wearing a red jacket over the same high school uniform as Derrion’s, comes up behind him and strikes him over the head with a 2×4 board.
Derrion crumpled to the ground in the parking lot adjacent to a community center in the 300 block of West 111th Street. As he struggled to get to his feet, a younger boy, wearing a dark shirt and Chicago Bulls shorts, dropped him again with a vicious punch to the jaw.
Derrion tries to rise again and stumbles a few yards to a street corner where the young savages realize he’s easy prey and set upon him with their fists, feet and boards.
Several youth workers, and a passerby who abandoned his truck in the street, helped drag the mortally wounded boy into the nearby Agape Community Center. Police arrived on the scene seconds later and remained with them until an ambulance arrived.
According to the coroner, Derrion died from massive bleeding in the brain caused by blunt force trauma to the head. Four students in all were injured in the melee.
Monique Bond, Chicago Public Schools spokeswoman, tried to distance Fenger Academy from the violence that claimed the life of one of its students.
According to the Sun-Times, Bond said the school district was told there is possibly a conflict between two gang “factions,” but “it has nothing to do with the school.”
But clearly the video shows otherwise as most of the participants in the brawl, including the assailants, wore Fenger Academy school uniforms.
Chicago police were questioning several “persons of interest” Sunday night in connection with the fatal beating.
