In a horrific assault in Center City Saturday night, three teenagers who were spouting off racial slurs pulled a man out of a cab to beat him and when the cab driver intervened to stop the assault, the teens turned their rage on him, according to police.
Around 8:23 p.m., a Liberty Taxi cab was stopped at a red light at 15th and Chestnut streets when two 17-year-old boys and a 15-year-old boy approached the cab and started calling the male passenger in the back seat racially derogatory names, police said.
The boys then threw an unknown liquid at the cab before they opened the door and pulled the passenger out and started pummeling him, according to police.
When the cabbie got out of the car to see what was going on, the passenger ran away and the teens turned on the cabbie. They punched him in the face, kicked him and threw an unknown liquid on him, police said.
Despite being outnumbered, the cabbie was able to grab a tire iron from his trunk at which time the teens ran away. The taxi driver was able to flag down a nearby officer and all three boys were arrested and charged as juveniles with aggravated assault and related offenses.
The cab driver suffered an injury to his right eye and had stomach and side pain, police said. The passenger remains unidentified.
Police said the three teens were black and the cabbie and passenger were white. Police did not immediately know if the teens would or could face hate crime charges.
Dana DiFilippo has covered murder, mayhem and miscellany at the Daily News since 2000. She grew up in Delaware County and studied journalism and photography at Penn State University. E-mail tips to difilid@phillynews.com.
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Stephanie Farr has been reporting for the Daily News since 2007, covering everything from gay porn stars who entered the burglary business to moon trees, skinheads, murders and naked bike rides. She covers crime, both in the city and suburbs, and keeps clippings of bizarre Associated Press articles. Her favorite this year was the story about the drunk in Punxsutawney who gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a dead opossum. E-mail tips to farrs@phillynews.com.
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Phillip Lucas joined the Daily News crime team in 2011. He grew up on the mean streets of Seattle and studied journalism and psychology at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Before landing in the City of Brotherly Love, Phillip was a reporter for The News Journal in Wilmington, Del. Email tips to lucasp@phillynews.com.
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Morgan Zalot is the newest crime reporter at the Daily News, starting in 2011 after interning at the paper twice as a Temple University journalism student. In her past stints at the DN, she covered just about everything, from drunken Phillies fans to a barber shop in a high school to a grisly murder-suicide. She’s a born-and-raised Philly girl who grew up in the Northeast. E-mail tips to zalotm@philly.com.
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