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A mob of teens on bikes swarmed a Los Angeles grocery store — ransacking shelves, spraying pepper spray, terrorizing shoppers, and assaulting a couple in the parking lot, security camera footage shows.
More than a dozen bicycling hooligans blew past store security in the April 19th raid, grabbing merch and leaving a cloud of mace in their wake, footage obtained by KTLA shows.
When they left the store, they turned their wrath on two men hiding in their car, throwing rocks and bottles and hurling homophobic insults at the trapped, terrified couple.
“Saying things like, ‘You guys gay?’ Homophobic slurs, hitting the car, throwing bottles,” one of the victims, Ryan Benson, told KTLA.
“There was so much pepper spray in the air that everyone in the store was coughing, sneezing, hiding their face under their shirt,” Benson added.
Benson said his car sustained thousands of dollars in damage and that some of the teens involved in the attack threatened him after he posted about the harrowing ordeal on social media.
The gang may be behind other violent incidents in the city this year, including the raid of several 7-Eleven stores and the savage beating of a man near Beverly Hills in February, the Los Angeles Police Department told KTLA.
In the February incident, a swarm of teens involved in a “street takeover” pushed and kicked a man who had left his car to confront them, a viral cell phone video showed.
“Our window is broken, our windshield is cracked, both doors are dented, and there is a dent with paint damage,” Benson told KTLA.
“I understand that they’re children, but these are really scary things and we can’t just decide that it’s not happening.”
The City of Angels has been plagued with such riots.
Street takeovers doubled during the pandemic, according to the LA Times, and have held steady, with packs of hooligans in cars and bicycles shutting down traffic.
Last November, one street takeover ended with two people in the hospital when they were clobbered by a car doing donuts, NBC 4 reported.
The mayhem prompted an LAPD crackdown, and this month, county authorities weighed doubling fines for street takeovers from $500 to $1,000, a Board of Supervisors meeting agenda showed.
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