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June 20, 2007

Mom heard son being attacked

She was on the phone with the teen when two boys used anti-gay slurs and beat him.

By MICHAEL A. MOHAMMED

TOWN 'N COUNTRY - Kathy Thyben was on the phone to her son when she heard the voices of his attackers.

She said they used anti-gay slurs and made vulgar comments to the four girls Eric Thyben had been sitting with on a bench along the Upper Tampa Bay Trail on Thursday night.

"If I pushed you off this bench, what would you do?, " one boy asked.

"Nothing, " Eric replied.

Seconds later, her 15-year-old son shouted to his mother that a pair of bigger boys were hitting him in the face.

"All I hear is 'Hey, stop hitting me, man!"

One slapped the phone out of his hand. Eric's sister Julie, 13, picked it up.

"My daughter is screaming, 'Mom, they're beating him, they're beating him, '" Kathy Thyben said. "I go flying out the door, barefoot in pajamas."

Frantic, she searched along the dark trail behind her house.

When she found them, she saw blood on Eric's face. His eye had turned red and started to swell.

Eric Thyben said he didn't know the three boys who walked up and started spitting anti-gay epithets as he hung out along the trail with Julie, her 12-year-old friend, and two teenage female friends.

Eric said that after he told them he wouldn't fight back, one boy started punching him in the face while the other hit him in the back of the head. The third, Eric said, did not participate in the beating.

He said he stayed where he was, letting them hit him because he didn't want them to hurt the girls.

"The guys were pretty big and they tried to hurt my sister, because she was cussing and screaming at them, " Eric said.

Though the boys ran away when Kathy Thyben arrived, Julie and her friend said they recognized one of them as a fellow student at Davidson Middle School.

Kathy Thyben said they found the two attackers in the school yearbook, and she called sheriff's deputies.

Hillsborough sheriff's spokesman J.D. Callaway said the two boys, whom the Times is not naming because of their age, have been arrested and charged with third-degree felony battery. The attack is being treated as a hate crime.

Posted by admin at June 20, 2007 10:04 AM