by Mark McDermott
The brutal attack of a 56-year-old man by a group of juveniles on e-bikes that took place in Hermosa Beach last week involved students from Manhattan Beach.
Principal Matthew D. Horvath sent an email to Manhattan Beach Middle School parents and community members on November 30 confirming that at least some of the kids involved in the incident, which took place on the night of November 21 and resulted in the arrests of two juveniles, are MBMS students.
“This event has understandably caused concern, anger, and sadness across our community, and I share those feelings,” Horvath wrote. “While I must protect student privacy and respect the ongoing police investigation, I can confirm that MBMS students were involved in this off-campus incident. I also recognize that students may feel unsettled or confused by what they are seeing in the news or hearing from peers, and our counselors are available to support any student who may need it.”
Hermosa Beach police released a statement on November 26 that said that all five juveniles involved in the incident had been identified, and the two juveniles believed to be the “primary aggressors” had been arrested and detained at Juvenile Hall. All the kids were identified as between 13 and 15 years old.
The incident began when the man was walking home with a pizza box on 11th Place, near the Hermosa Beach pier. The kids, all on e-bikes and wearing hoods, engaged with the man before attacking him and knocking him to the concrete. Surveillance footage shown on Fox11 shows the juveniles stomping and kicking the victim while he is on the ground.
“He’s dead, he’s dead,” one of the kids can be heard saying, while standing over the motionless victim. The juveniles then left the scene.
Fox11 reported that a neighbor, Matt Terrill watched his own surveillance footage after viewing the attack in-person. “They met up here five minutes before and they were talking about doing something, they wanted to do something, they wanted to get someone,” Terrill said. “They come up to the victim and they say ‘Hey I want some pizza.’ As the victim is talking to them the rest of the kids surround him, as if they planned it.”
Horvath reassured the MBMS community that behavior such as this is not occurring at the school.
“Your students are safe at school,” he wrote. “This behavior is unacceptable and will never be tolerated at MBMS.”
But the principal also said MBMS staff is taking the incident “extremely seriously” and cooperating with law enforcement on the matter. He also issued a “call for community responsibility” regarding kids and e-bikes. He urged families to have “direct, honest conversations” with their children regarding e-bike safety and understanding “that actions outside of school have real-world consequences.”
Manhattan Beach Mayor Pro Tem Joe Franklin, an avid cyclist who has led the city’s efforts at e-bike safety education, said in some sense the incident in Hermosa was less about e-bikes or so-called “e-bike gangs” and more fundamentally about kids behaving terribly.
“It’s bad behavior,” Franklin said. “They just happen to now have a vehicle that goes 30 to 40 miles per hour.”
Franklin said Manhattan Beach’s stepped up enforcement of e-bike infractions — including speeding, riding on sidewalks, and not wearing helmets — has resulted in hundreds of citations, which begin at $500 for a first violation and often involve impoundment of the vehicles. He also said MBPD’s school resource officers have developed relationships with the kids who ride in groups and as a result their presence in the city is less pronounced than it was. Franklin said e-bikers assault in Hermosa Beach
could have been an indirect result of MBPD’s strict enforcement approach.
“I think they knew our police department, the Manhattan Beach Police Department, are aware of them, and maybe there was just more scrutiny,” he said. “And they said, ‘Hey, we’re just going to go elsewhere.’”
Franklin praised HBPD’s handling of the incident. “Great job, Hermosa Beach Police Department,” he said. “This was terrific detective work.”
But Franklin acknowledged that the problem of teens and e-bikes persists in Manhattan Beach. A survey commissioned by the city released this week identified e-bike safety issues as one of residents biggest concerns. Among city services, addressing e-bike safety had the lowest ranking of 23 services surveyed, with 59 percent of residents expressing dissatisfaction.
Franklin said e-bikes are a valuable part of the “micro-transit” mix that can reduce congestion, ease parking, and reduce climate pollution. But he said the mix of teens and e-bikes seems to inevitably create safety issues.
“If I had my kids going to school now, I would not let them ride an e-bike,” he said. “First of all, they need the exercise, for heaven’s sake. But there’s a lot of mimicry that goes on. At one point, all the rage was doing wheelies. Can you imagine these kids are doing wheelies down the hill to the Manhattan Beach pier, going 30 miles an hour? They put their knees on the bike seat and then they lift up, that’s how they get the highest wheelie. It’s just absolutely crazy.”
TikTok is also in the mix. Much of what the groups of juvenile e-bike riders do appears to be performative. The e-bike group most commonly associated with Manhattan Beach, the MB Goonz, in recent years documented many of their stunts on TikTok via video, including running from police, flashing wads of hundred dollar bills, gangster-style, and just cruising together throughout the South Bay at night. Tellingly, KTLA reported that one of the kids involved in the Hermosa incident appeared to be videoing it.
“As the group…start to leave, one of the alleged teens appears to either take photos or film of the victim while he’s incapacitated,” KTLA reported, “and then eventually takes off.” ER
All quiet on the comment front doesn’t mean everybody isn’t reading this story
Good detective work is a joke comment about the hapless HBPD. They only solved it because a parent turned the attackers in.
If you want to report on e-bikes safety issues, do it. This, however, is supposed to be an article about a brutal attack on an innocent man by juvenile criminals. Their choice of transportation to the crime had no bearing on their ensuing actions. Based upon all available information, the bikes played zero role in this assaut. These disturbed teens did not use their bikes as weapons, nor did they run the man over. Please report responsibly and avoid stoking unnecessary hostility toward our community’s youth, the vast majority of whom are not involved in a “gang”, are not criminally-minded, and ride their bikes lawfully and responsibly.