The scene was so bad Hampden resident Joyce King thought she was witnessing a murder in progress.
“Stop! Get off of her! You?re going to kill that girl!” King shouted at middle schoolers she saw beating a 26-year-old woman in a gutter near a Baltimore City bus.
King?s testimony came Friday during the fourth day of trial in the assault case against five Robert Poole Middle School students charged with beating Sarah Kreager, 26, Troy Ennis, 30, and the No. 27 bus driver as more than 40 students rode home from school Dec. 4.
Around 3 p.m. that day, King testified she was at her home in the 3200 block Chestnut Avenue when she heard “a loud noise” as a Maryland Transit Administration bus “slammed into the curb.”
“I saw the back doors on the bus fly open and a girl fly out and a whole bus of kids come behind her,” she said. “The girl went down on the ground and as she tried to get backup they all started kicking and punching her.”
King said about 15 to 20 students followed Kreager off the bus.
“This happened all at once,” she said. “Everyone was doing it all. I didn?t see anyone holding back.”
As King tried to get the students to stop the assault, she noticed the bus was “violently rocking,” King testified.
She ordered her daughter: “Go call the police and tell them there?s a riot on the bus!”
After King confronted the kids, they ran off and the woman turned her attention to Kreager, she said.
“Her eye, it just looked like it has exploded,” King testified, holding her hand in front of her face. “She had a big eye out to here. … It was really, really bad.”
Of the nine students initially charged in the beating, prosecutors have dropped three of their cases, but secured one conviction.
One 14-year-old girl pleaded “involved” ? the juvenile equivalent to guilty ? to misdemeanor assault after admitting to striking Kreager one time.
The trial resumes Monday.
