Matthew Quain still struggles to piece together what happened after a trip to the grocery store nearly turned deadly. He remembers a group of loitering young people, a dimly lit street — then nothing.
The 51-year-old became another victim of “Knockout King” or simply “Knock Out,” a so-called game of unprovoked violence that targets random victims.
Reports of the attacks have come from around the country including Massachusetts, New Jersey and Chicago. In St Louis, an elderly immigrant from Vietnam died in an attack last spring.
The rules are as simple as they are brutal. A group chooses a lead attacker, then seeks out a victim. Unlike typical gang violence or other street crime, the goal is not revenge, nor is it robbery. The victim is chosen at random, often someone unlikely to put up a fight. Many victims have been elderly. Most were alone.
The attacker charges and begins punching. If the victim goes down, the group usually scatters. If not, others join in, punching and kicking, often until the person is unconscious or badly hurt. Sometimes the attacks are captured on cellphone video that is posted on Web sites.
“These individuals have absolutely no respect for human life,” St Louis Mayor Francis Slay said.
Slay knows firsthand. He was on his way home from a theater the night of Oct. 21 when he saw perhaps a dozen young people casually crossing a street. He looked to the curb and saw Quain sprawled on the pavement.
Slay told his driver to pull over. They found Quain unconscious, blood pouring from his head and mouth.
Quain was hospitalized for two days with a broken jaw, a cracked skull and nasal cavity injuries. He still has headaches and memory problems, but was able to return to work earlier this month. Hundreds gathered last month for a fundraiser at the pizza restaurant where he works, but he still does not know how he’ll pay the medical bills.
“I remember ... waking up on the corner with the mayor standing next to me,” Quain said. “I tried to say: ‘Hi’ but my jaw was broken.”
It is not clear how long Knockout King has been around or how many attacks have occurred. The FBI does not track it separately. Slay said he has heard from several mayors about similar attacks, and criminologists agree versions of the game are going on in many places.
St Louis Police Chief Dan Isom said the city has had about 10 Knockout King attacks over the past 15 months.
Experts say it is a grab for attention.
“We know that juveniles do not think out consequences clearly,” said Beth Huebner, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St Louis. “They see something on YouTube and say: ‘I want to get that sort of attention, too.”
Scott Decker, a criminologist at Arizona State, said the attacks are a modern extension of gang-like behavior — instead of painting over another gang’s graffiti as a show of toughness, they beat someone up and post a video on social media sites.
Earlier this year in Chicago, a group of teens followed an elderly homeless man at a train station. One teen punched him in the face, knocking him out as the friends laughed and mocked the man. The video of the attack was posted on a hip-hop site, where it got about a quarter-of-a-million views within two days. The teen was not arrested because police couldn’t find the homeless man.
The crimes are not limited to big cities. In 2009, Adam Taylor entered a parking garage in Columbia, Missouri, where surveillance footage later showed a group of teens following him, then punching and kicking him as he lay on the ground. Taylor suffered bruising on the brain, whiplash and internal bleeding, but survived.
Another attack killed Vietnamese immigrant Hoang Nguyen.
The 72-year-old was returning with his wife to their apartment after walking to a grocery store in broad daylight one April morning.
They took a shortcut through an alley, where a group of young people charged them. Hoang was attacked as he stepped in front of his wife to protect her. The attack went on as he begged for mercy, she told police.
Hoang died of massive injuries. Elex Murphy, 18, was charged with first-degree murder and allegedly told police the attack was part of the Knockout King game. His attorney declined to comment.
Two former Chilean ministers are among four candidates competing this weekend for the presidential nomination of the left ahead of November elections dominated by rising levels of violent crime. More than 15 million voters are eligible to choose today between former minister of labor Jeannette Jara, former minister of the interior Carolina Toha and two members of parliament, Gonzalo Winter and Jaime Mulet, to represent the left against a resurgent right. The primary is open to members of the parties within Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s ruling left-wing coalition and other voters who are not affiliated with specific parties. A recent poll by the
Irish-language rap group Kneecap on Saturday gave an impassioned performance for tens of thousands of fans at the Glastonbury Festival despite criticism by British politicians and a terror charge for one of the trio. Liam Og O hAnnaidh, who performs under the stage name Mo Chara, has been charged under the UK’s Terrorism Act with supporting a proscribed organization for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert in London in November last year. The rapper, who was charged under the anglicized version of his name, Liam O’Hanna, is on unconditional bail before a further court hearing in August. “Glastonbury,
TENSIONS HIGH: For more than half a year, students have organized protests around the country, while the Serbian presaident said they are part of a foreign plot About 140,000 protesters rallied in Belgrade, the largest turnout over the past few months, as student-led demonstrations mount pressure on the populist government to call early elections. The rally was one of the largest in more than half a year student-led actions, which began in November last year after the roof of a train station collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people — a tragedy widely blamed on entrenched corruption. On Saturday, a sea of protesters filled Belgrade’s largest square and poured into several surrounding streets. The independent protest monitor Archive of Public Gatherings estimated the
FLYBY: The object, appears to be traveling more than 60 kilometers per second, meaning it is not bound by the sun’s orbit, astronomers studying 3I/Atlas said Astronomers on Wednesday confirmed the discovery of an interstellar object racing through the solar system — only the third-ever spotted, although scientists suspect many more might slip past unnoticed. The visitor from the stars, designated 3I/Atlas, is likely the largest yet detected, and has been classified as a comet, or cosmic snowball. “It looks kind of fuzzy,” said Peter Veres, an astronomer with the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, which was responsible for the official confirmation. “It seems that there is some gas around it, and I think one or two telescopes reported a very short tail.” Originally known as A11pl3Z before