This horrific video shows a 13-year-old white boy in Gulfport, Florida being savagely beaten by three black classmates. They threw dozens of punches and when the boy tried to crawl underneath a seat, they unleashed a flurry of kicks and stomps.
Not a single person on board the bus tried to stop the brutal rampage as the trio of thugs broke the boy’s arm.
The school bus driver can be heard frantically calling a radio dispatcher for assistance as the boy screamed in pain and agony.
“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.
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.”
Not a single owner of a failed women’s television network has likened the beating to Emmett Till.
The bus driver, who retired a few weeks after the attack, has defended his decision not to physically intervene in the altercation. He said he was following district policies that forbid drivers from getting involved.
“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 Tampa Bay Times. “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.
Prosecutors decided not to charge the bus driver because 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.
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.
Todd Starnes is the host of Fox News & Commentary.
