Teens tried to stonewall police

In assembling a case against a group accused of beating a passenger aboard a city bus, police had to sort through conflicting statements from middle school students who appeared streetwise beyond their years.

In interrogation rooms, detectives faced off against recalcitrant children as young as 14 who remained defiant even as interrogators threatened them with adult charges and warned that their friends might be giving them up in a room next door.

One 14-year-old boy repeatedly told a Maryland Transit Administration Police sergeant that he saw the fight on the No. 27 bus in Hampden but couldn't name the people involved.

"They go to my school, but I don't hang with them," he said after the officer insinuated that he was lying because the boy refused to make eye contact.

"You know the guys you catch the bus with all the time," the sergeant said. "You see their faces all the time. Even if you don't know their last names, you know their first names. Is it that you don't want to tell me, is that it?"

The boy answered: "No, I ain't going to put them out there like that."

Hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The Sun recount police interviews in which the Robert Poole Middle School students accused in the December attack on Sarah Kreager and her boyfriend, Troy Ennis, tried to stonewall authorities.

Girls told stories that didn't match, and at one point, while they were in a holding cell, a city police officer watched them mimic the beating they were accused of carrying out -- laughing as they threw kicks and punches into the air.

Despite weeks of testimony and a ruling Tuesday by a juvenile court judge, who found five teens responsible in various ways for what 911 callers described as a riot, key details remain unclear, and those involved on both sides remain deeply divided over whether justice has been achieved.

"I didn't think it was fair," said the father of one of the boys who was found responsible. "From looking at the evidence, there wasn't any."

The judge, prosecutors and the bus driver disagreed. Danny Williams, 49, had worked as a correctional officer before he signed on to drive a bus.

Fights he witnessed in jail couldn't compare to the melee that left his bus in tatters -- a window shattered, seats torn and the back door left hanging from its hinges. Williams said in an interview, "If they kicked that woman a little higher in the head, she would've been brain dead."

The case played upon the racial fears of residents in a city troubled by crime -- a white woman attacked by black youths. Some students accused Ennis of using a racial slur, and some said Kreager spat. Kreager adamantly denied the accusations, and in court said it was one of the girls who first introduced race by telling her: "You white bitches think you own everything," when Kreager tried to sit in a spot the teen said was reserved for "her home girl."

The attack prompted the bus driver to grind his vehicle to a halt on 33rd Street at Chestnut Avenue, a few blocks from Robert Poole Middle School. Joyce King watched from her home as the back door swung open and Kreager tumbled out and into a gutter.

Then, the 57-year-old grandmother saw the teens pounce. Screaming, she rushed to help.

But in court, King couldn't identify the attackers. She said in an interview that she was too afraid to make eye contact with them. "I had this awful sense of dread that they would start hitting her again, and I wouldn't be able to do anything to stop them."

Police officers who arrived found the youths in two groups, rounded them up and had Kreager identify her attackers. They were taken to an MTA office on North Eutaw Street to be interviewed.

It was there that police heard diverging accounts of what happened aboard the No. 27 bus, according to the transcripts.

"The white man and his wife got on the bus," a 14-year-old girl told Detective Anjanette McBride Jones. "And she already had an attitude when she got on the bus ... and she went to whisper in her husband's ear something, and he said spit on them [racial slur]. And that's when Nakita got up and walked to the back of the bus. ... But she swung on Nakita and hit Nakita in her face and Nakita slapped her back."

She said that after the fight the kids knew they had hurt Kreager, and nine minutes after the recording started, the girl tells police, "I hit her, but I ain't really, you know, hit so hard."

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