Two black teenagers were arrested Thursday in
the assault on a young Jewish man, police said. The assault raised racial
tensions in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Besean Parker, 14, and Namor Clarke, 17,
will be charged as adults with robbery, according to police. Police also said
the assault on 16-year-old Alon Sherman was not motivated by bias. Clarke was
arrested before this incident for robbery.
Sherman was riding his bicycle after midnight to buy baby formula for his
younger brother, when two teenagers knocked him to the ground near Albany Avenue and
Empire Boulevard in Crown
Heights and robbed of his
bike, watch and cell phone. He suffered a fractured jaw in the assault. Investigators
deemed the assault a “crime of opportunity” that was not racially motivated, a
law enforcement source said, according to the Daily News.
Besean Parker’s brother, 13, said that his
older brother did nothing wrong and shouldn’t be prosecuted as an adult. “He
was there, but he didn't hit the kid,” said Jalen outside his Crown Heights
home, according to the same source. “He's young and he's a good person. He just
got himself at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The assault came nearly a month after
Andrew Charles, the 20-year-old black son of a police officer, was assaulted,
reportedly by a member of a Hasidic anti-crime patrol and after black children
threw rocks through the window of a school bus carrying Jewish toddlers on May
12.
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