Police busted seven members of a street gang known as the "Latin King Goonies" in the brutal bias attacks of two teens and two men, some of whom are gay, MyFoxNY reported Friday.
The attack occured last weekend in the Bronx, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said.
Members of a street gang reportedly discovered one of their recruits was gay, so they attacked the teen, brutally beating and torturing him and two other people in gruesome assaults last Sunday, police said Friday.
The suspects, ranging in age from 16 to 23, are charged with assault, unlawful imprisonment, sodomy, and menacing as hate crimes.
The recruit, 17-year-old male, was forced into an unoccupied apartment early Sunday morning. He was beaten and sodomized with the wooden handle of a plunger, Kelly said. The attackers shouted anti-gay slurs during the attack, Kelly said.
About two hours later, the teen was eventually released and told not to tell anyone. He walked to a hospital where he was treated, but he reported his injuries were due to a robbery.
Using information obtained from their interrogation of the recruit, a second 17-year-old was beaten and robbed of his jewelry in the same apartment on Sunday evening, , according to Kelly.
The second teen was assaulted at about 8:30 p.m. Sunday, police said. The 30-year-old arrived about an hour later with Four Loko, a malt liquor beverage, thinking he was going to a party. He was stripped to his underwear and tied to a chair opposite the other teen, who was forced by the angry mob to burn the man with cigarettes, police said. They beat the 30-year-old, forced him to drink copious amounts of the liquor he brought, and sodomized him with a small baseball bat, Kelly said.
The man was beaten for hours, a suspect said, and then was dumped at his brother's home. That is where the suspects beat and robbed the man's brother.
"These suspects deployed terrible, wolf pack odds of nine against one, which revealed them as predators whose crimes were as cowardly as they were despicable," Kelly said Friday at a news conference.
Police are searching for two other men in the attacks.
"These anti-LGBT hate crimes are vile, horrifying and unforgivable. These attacks are appalling and are even more despicable because the victims were clearly targeted in acts of hate simply because they are gay," Council Speaker Christine Quinn said in a statement. "The cowardly few who committed these crimes do not represent New Yorkers and our community will not be cowed by such violence."
The Associated Press and MyFoxNY contributed to this report.
Click here to read more on this story from MyFoxNY.com.
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