'Bum bashings' a night of fun for young punks
BY FRED GRIMM

fgrimm@MiamiHerald.com

They do it for sport.

They beat the homeless. Occasionally they kill the homeless.

If the gut-wrenching scenes captured on a grainy surveillance video of two teenagers clubbing a helpless street person in downtown Fort Lauderdale left you stunned and groping for answers, here's the answer: for fun. They do it to stave off boredom in those empty hours when the rest of us sleep.

Norris Gaynor, 45, was killed early Thursday. Two other homeless men were beaten with baseball bats.

It wasn't about robbery. It wasn't about revenge. It wasn't about neo-facist fanatics out to cleanse city streets of drunk, drugged or deranged vagrants. Police discovered a single motive: Just for grins.

Local teenagers from middle-class families were charged with ghastly attacks on physically and mentally diminished street people. Maybe it doesn't do much to ease our collective shame, but young men beating the homeless for the pure joy of hurting a defenseless person has become a perverse national trend. ''We consider it a national epidemic,'' said Michael Stoops, who runs the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington.

386 ATTACKS, 156 DEATHS

The coalition counted 386 attacks against homeless people from 1999 to 2004 that it calls hate crimes, including 156 deaths. Stoops said Monday the figures coming in from 2005 hardly indicate the trend has abated. Many of the attacks, whether in Los Angeles or Holly Hill, Fla., had a shocking similarity to what unfolded last week in Fort Lauderdale.

In 2003, two teenagers were charged with beating a homeless panhandler to death for no particular reason outside a 7-Eleven in Melbourne, Fla. Last August, in Holly Hill, five ''bored'' teenagers were charged with stabbing, beating and kicking a 53-year-old homeless alcoholic to death. They dragged his body into the woods, then led friends to the scene to show off their
work. They called their sport ``bum bashing.'' Last August in Los Angeles, two teenagers were charged with attempted murder
after a beating spree with aluminum baseball bats. One of their victims was left in critical condition with severe head trauma. The two 19-year-olds told L.A. police they had just watched Bumfights, the infamous $20 DVD that has sold almost 300,000 copies over the Internet and were inspired to do a little bum bashing on their own.

A 'BUMFIGHTS' LINK?

Fort Lauderdale police say rumors of a Bumfights connection surfaced during this investigation, though they found no evidence that the young men charged in the case had watched the video or visited the Bumfights website. Low-rent
filmmakers in Southern California had paid street people to attack one another.

A judge in San Diego sentenced two of the filmmakers to 180 days in jail last year after they blew off their community service sentence. The judge said he was perplexed by their attitude -- ``They believe they haven't done anything wrong.''

They did their 180 days while a third edition of Bumfights sold on the Internet. Along with at least four other imitators, Stoops said.

It's difficult to imagine that 156 deaths in five years of a particular
nationality or ethnic group would not stir national outrage. But these particular Americans are pummeled and killed with not much more than a local reaction. Even this tragedy comes couched as, ''How could this happen to a nice middle class family?'', with Norris Gaynor reduced to a bit player in a
family drama.

The message leaching through society is that the homeless are so utterly worthless that they can be abused with impunity. The teens charged in both the Fort Lauderdale and L.A. cases didn't even bother to get rid of their baseball bats.

Hey, it's just sport.