Beege wrote about this case Monday. A 17-year-old high school student named Jonathan Lewis was murdered by a large group of high school students over some stolen items. Lewis was reportedly standing up for a smaller friend who’d been robbed. Yesterday, police announced that 8 people who were part of the mob attack have been identified, arrested and are now facing murder charges.

Authorities in Las Vegas announced late Tuesday that arrests have been made, and eight teenagers are facing murder charges in a deadly beating that left a high-school student dead earlier this month.

All eight suspects are between the ages of 13 and 17, according to officials.

Police suggested there were more arrests to come in the case as soon as the remaining two individuals seen in the video are identified.

At least two other people believed to have been involved in the attack have not been identified, and the police department Tuesday night planned to circulate video of the pair with the hope someone would recognize them and come forward, Johansson said.

Johansson said the fight was over stolen headphones and possibly a stolen marijuana vape pen that belonged to either Lewis or his friend. The friend had agreed to a fight in the alley after school, he said, but as the parties squared off, Lewis apparently stepped in to defend his friend and was attacked.

It’s still not clear if all of the teens will be tried as adults but at least four of them will be.

A judge ordered four teenagers sent to the Clark County Detention Center on Wednesday to be tried as adults after they were arrested on suspicion of murder in connection with the fatal group beating of a 17-year-old Rancho High School student…

Gianni Robinson, Damien Hernandez, Treavion Randolph and Dontral Beaver — the four teens whose cases were all automatically transferred to the adult court system on Wednesday — are all 16 or 17 years old, according to an official with the district attorney’s office. Because the other teenagers are younger than 16, ranging in age from 13 to 15, they must face certification hearings in Family Court so a judge can determine if they will be tried as adults.

So more of these kids could wind up being treated as adults but that will be up to a Family Court judge. I’m not an expert on Nevada state law but it seems only the 13-year-old is exempt from the possibility of having this case moved to adult court. Any juveniles that are convicted of murder as adults would be facing 25 years in prison.

As Beege pointed out earlier, the media is going out of its way not to mention the obvious racial angle to this attack. Jonathan Lewis was white and all of his attackers were black. Fox News mentions it implicitly when it points out that police have decided this wasn’t a hate crime.

Johannson described the video as “void of humanity” and said there was no evidence the incident could be considered a hate crime.

And credit to the Washington Post which actually explained the context.

At Tuesday’s news conference, Johansson was asked whether authorities were investigating the incident as a possible hate crime since Lewis was White and most of the teens involved in the beating are Black. Police indicated they do not believe it was a hate crime.

“Right now, I have no evidence at all that this is a hate crime,” Johansson said. “It is a murder, which in my opinion is a very heinous crime in and of itself, but I do not have evidence of a hate crime.”

It’s really hard to imagine that if this were 10+ white kids beating to death one black kid that anyone would believe there wasn’t a hate crime taking place. In that case Benjamin Crump would have parachuted into town and every reader would know about the racial aspect of the story from the headline.

Here’s the detailed police description of the crime published yesterday. After beating him the assailants all fled and left Lewis there in an alley. It was a passerby who saw him and carried him back to the school.