Philadelphia High School Students Brawl On SEPTA Subway Platform [Surveillance Video]
A punching-and-kicking brawl among teenagers broke out in a Philadelphia subway station on Tuesday afternoon which was captured on surveillance video. Two of the victims in the violent incident involving about 12 teenagers are believed to be students at Ben Franklin High School.
The attacked occurred at the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) Spring Garden Station on the Broad Street Line. One student even fell on the tracks during the melee and appeared to pull himself up and get back into the fight; see surveillance footage embedded below.
No arrests have yet been made as police try to identify suspects via the video and request help from witnesses. There have been no reported injuries, and none of the victims lodged complaints with authorities either.
“Unfortunately, nobody reported the incident to police, so we found out through our surveillance feeds as we often look back at peak points when students might be leaving school,” a SEPTA spokesman told Philly Voice.
Everything was routine in the station that afternoon until the sudden mayhem began. “It starts calmly enough and then chaos. One of the students swings at another and a full scale brawl erupts on the platform, with multiple groups of students fighting all over the area, as other people waiting for the train look on terrified. It goes on for some time; a fight that police suspect was planned in advance by the teenagers involved,” CBS News Philadelphia reported.
Cops have since beefed up patrols at the Spring Garden station and at other SEPTA hot spots.
Said SEPTA Police Chief Thomas Nestel about the brawl on the platform, “It’s an outrageous event. This is so dangerous it’s not even funny. We have operating trains down there, there are passengers waiting for the train. You see somebody falls into the track area. It’s horrendous.”
A Philadelphia school district official added, “We will be making sure and supporting SEPTA — that there are criminal charges in addition to anything else we will do in the school regarding this incident.”
Tuesday’s brawl among high school students is one of several recent violent incidents occurring in the Philadelphia SEPTA system. Late last month, a 60-year-old passenger standing on a train platform was allegedly sucker-punched and knocked out cold by a teen after they had argued inside a subway car. Also in March, a 15-year-old male was attacked by a mob of high school students at a SEPTA station in Center City Philadelphia.
[image via YouTube]
