Photo: Jonathan Lewis' Heart of a Champion Team: Father mourns son beaten to death by Las Vegas mob
Jonathan Lewis he was attacked by about 15 teenagers for protecting a small child outside a school and died a week later.
A grieving Nevada father has paid tribute to his 17-year-old son. «Heart of a Champion» and condemned teen violence after a mob beat a boy to death outside his high school for defending a young child.
Jonathan Lewis said his son, also named Jonathan, died at University Medical Center in Las Vegas last Tuesday, a week after the attack, which involved about 15 people, near the city's Rancho High School.
Witnesses say the teenager was pushed into a fence and then punched several times by mob members when he stood up for a younger friend who was being thrown into a trash bin.
“Jonathan was a loving, generous, kind and fierce young man who loved community and cared for others,” the boy's father wrote on a GoFundMe page raising money for his late son's medical bills.
«This horrific tragedy reflects the divisions, conflicts and indifference that our society and humanity currently face. Sympathy and love are great strength, but cowardly violence is pathetic. We condemn violence as a means of resolving sociological conflict.”
Police were called to a report of a mass fight near a school on the afternoon of November 1st. Officers found Jonathan bleeding from wounds to his head and performed CPR on him before he was taken to hospital and placed on life support.
Video footage posted on social media allegedly , about the attack, he is seen confronting one youth before more than a dozen others close in and knock him down.
«A couple of [people] attacked him and they couldn't hurt him enough and they all attacked him at the same time,» the boy's father told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
In a GoFundMe post, he said his son was a “fierce protector of loved ones” and “a kind, loving, gentle young man with the heart of a champion and the brightest loving energy that lovingly draws to people» .
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department detectives are investigating the incident, a police spokesman confirmed Monday, without elaborating. As of Friday, the department had not made any arrests, according to the Review-Journal.
Lewis Sr. said his son wants to join the U.S. Army and is preparing to move in with him in Austin, Texas. He expressed hope that his son's death could be a catalyst for greater efforts to combat the rising tide of youth violence in Las Vegas and across the country.
“I think that all of humanity has simply failed to realize that we need to teach our youth about coexistence,” he told Las Vegas TV station 8NewsNow.
Research published in April by the Centers for Compliance and Disease Prevention and Prevention (CDC) have called community violence a «major public health problem» and found that one in five schoolchildren have witnessed or experienced violence.
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