Jenice Armstrong: Caught on video: Teens behaving badly. Their parents are partly to blame

Nov. 24--A whole lot of you aren't doing a good job of rearing your kids.

You know, I'm right.

You may feed them, give them a place to live, and send them to school. But you have failed miserably in training your children to be decent human beings. You haven't given them any moral guidance. Nor have you taught them how to value and respect themselves.

You can tell by the foul language they use and by the way they conduct themselves on public transportation. You can tell by their antics when making their way along crowded sidewalks in Center City. And you can tell from watching videos of some recent attacks of innocent people who have been beaten by teens, acting like they're in a World Star Hip Hop fight video.

Most of you do a decent job of raising your kids. You, I applaud.

It's the rest of you that I have serious problems with. Because you failed Parenting 101, your out-of-control hellcats are steadily chipping away at the quality of life in this city. They make us afraid to go outside in certain neighborhoods, especially after dark.

With some of these kids, you literally take your life in your hands if you run afoul of them in any way. Take what happened last week after a mob of unruly kids beat a motorist senseless and left him lying in the street. It happened around 1:30 p.m. on Nov. 20, near 15th and Chestnut Streets, just steps away from City Hall.

It's unclear what set off the melee. But a surveillance video obtained by 6ABC shows a boy kicking a side view mirror on a vehicle and then striking it with his hand. The driver gets out of his car and runs up behind the boy. That's when the motorist gets jumped by a group of students who kick and punch him as he lies on the ground. Arrests have been made.

"Something is wrong in the home if they go out and do something like that," said Darin Toliver, cofounder of the Black Men at Penn School of Social Work, about the incident. "Even if [the motorist] had said something egregious does that still equate to having to stomp a person to the point where he's almost dead? Everything is a challenge and hostility. There's so much anger in people."

In another frightening incident, a student taunted two 16-year-old Little Flower High School students as they rode a bus from Hunting Park to the Erie-Torresdale station after school on Oct. 24. According to a video posted online, after they got off the bus in Juniata Park, the girl reportedly an Edison High School student, assaulted them as onlookers laughed. Abigail Croge suffered a broken nose and her friend Brigid Curry a concussion. The alleged assailant has been charged.

"We are probably going to be driving our kids to and from school," said Kristen Flanagan, Abigail's mother, who lives in Fishtown. "She's anxious as it is so this definitely doesn't help. She's lost some weight since it happened. Her schoolwork has been suffering a little bit since it happened. She's definitely having a bad time."

On Wednesday, a group of teen boys attacked a 17-year-old fast food worker at the McDonald's at Broad and Hunting Park after she refused to give them free food. The victim, identified by NBC 10 as Charm Sullivan, was knocked unconscious. There's a lot that's still unclear about what happened but her body was found outside the restaurant between some parked cars. It's unclear if arrests have been made in the case.

This was over fries and Big Macs, people.

What I want to know is who raised these young men who took it upon themselves to punch a young woman in the face like that?

The better question is who didn't raise them?

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