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The 18-year-old said he was beaten, chased and called a racial slurred last week while hanging out with friends at the Simi Valley shopping mall. And the video of the argument has attracted a lot of attention on social media.
Michael Robinson said he and his friends were approached by a group of seven or eight other teenagers who discussed previous differences. Michael said he was not involved in past issues and was not associated with any of the young men approaching them.
Suddenly one of his friends was punched in his face, and the group then focused on him.
“They were just screaming at me, just racial slander,” recalled Robinson, a black man. “I was honestly scared of my life because I was just hit in the back of my head. I didn’t know if I was about to leave.”
The cell phone video appears to capture the moment when Robinson said a group of over half a dozen young men attacked him outside a movie theater in Simi Valley last Friday night.
“I cried out, ‘I’ll help you, someone will help me,'” Robinson said.
The 18-year-old said the boys began chasing him again, and he had a chair to pull them away from him,
“They ended up threw a chair at me. It didn’t hit me. But I passed it. They chased me again,” Robinson said.
Robinson went home where he lives with Brittany Martin and her family. After hearing about the fight, Martin returns to the shopping centre and says he saw the police, but no immediate report was made.
Martin said officers came to her door when she returned to the house and reported the incident.
“He asked Michael, ‘Well, why did you leave the scene?’ he was very lightly missing,” she said.
A spokesman for the Simi Valley Police Station said four minors were arrested for batteries, causing them to get in the way of the incident. The department said it is considering reported racial slander and videos filmed on the night of the attack. Investigators said it was not immediately clear how the incident began and whether it constituted a possible hate crime.
What Robinson and Martin are concerned about are one of the alleged attackers and the son of a member of the Simi Valley Police Station.
The police department also confirmed that one of the teens on the scene was associated with the employee, but promised that the investigation would be “unrelated.”
“The employee was not on the scene and was not involved in the investigation,” Simi Valley police said. “A thorough and unbiased investigation will be conducted.”
Robinson’s lawyer Jamal Tucson said the police department was not sufficient to ensure fairness in the case.
“It’s not enough to say that the father isn’t involved in the investigation,” Tucson said. “I think there must be an independent research body that will step into us with justice that we deserve.”
Robinson claims he suffered a concussion, a broken tooth and other injuries.
The issue will be discussed at the Simi Valley Council meeting on Monday.
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