Once again, using a cell phone to film rather than to call 911 appears to be the priority of at least one witness as a gang of teens stabbed to death 14-year-old boy on a Bronx playground in what authorities say was a case of mistaken identity.
The mob of teens jumped ninth-grader Angel Mendoza at the Williamsbridge Oval Playground in Norwood late Tuesday with someone filming the incident as the boy was “pistol-whipped, beaten and repeatedly knifed,” the New York Post reported.
Police told news outlets the lengthy assault was for revenge for an earlier fight in which the teen Mendoza was not even involved.
Four teenagers — Andrew Ansah, 18, Jordan Williams, 18, and two other boys, ages 15 and 16, whose names were not released because they are minors — have been arrested and charged over the killing. Two more suspects are being sought.
Police are investigating if the suspects have any ties to the brutal Trinitarios gang, sources told the Post.
That same Bronx gang was behind the 2018 fatal attack on 15-year-old Lesandro “Junior” Guzman-Feliz – another case of mistaken identity in one of New York’s most horrifying murders. As Breitbart News reported, that attack was captured on surveillance video from a nearby business.
Bystander videos of assaults do help police identify and prosecute suspects, but they also cause witnesses to focus on filming rather than calling for help and preventing further injuries or even death.
Such was the case of the viral videos that hit social media from a vicious street beatdown in Cincinnati two weeks ago. Authorities were critical of the estimated 100 bystanders who witnessed the attack, with lots of filming going on, but only one calling in the assault to police.
It was not immediately clear if the gang filmed the violence themselves in the Bronx case, or if it was captured by a bystander, according to the Post. Authorities have not released the video.
Angel Mendoza was friends with one of the other teens involved in an initial fight, police said, which included a 17-year-old being stabbed in the shoulder and the abdomen.
His family told the Daily News that Angel often went to the park to play basketball but lately had become rebellious and insistent on hanging out with his pals.
“He was really lovely, really calm and friendly, but he always wants to be behind his friends,” his father, Miguel Mendoza, told the newspaper in Spanish. “And whatever his friend does, he was gonna do.”
Paramedics rushed Mendoza to the Jacobi Medical Center after they found him wounded on the blood-covered playground around 7:30 p.m. He was pronounced dead not two hours later.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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