About two dozen gang members armed with baseball bats and tire irons attacked a 14-year-old in a city park, and a teenage girl in the group stabbed him to death, police said.
“It was just mayhem,” said Kevin McCarthy, who saw the attack Tuesday afternoon and called authorities. “They were just running all over the place.”
Houston police Capt. Dwayne Ready said the gang members swarmed Gabriel Granillo and two other boys from both sides of the park around 2:45 p.m.
“The approach of the large gang, how the three were caught by surprise, the time of day, those kinds of issues indicate this wasn’t just one of your random crimes of opportunity,” Ready said.
They also slashed the tires and smashed the windshield of a vehicle apparently belonging to Granillo’s friends, McCarthy said. Two males with the victim were taken in for questioning, police said.
No one had been arrested as of Wednesday.
Granillo, whom police said was affiliated with gangs, had recently left juvenile detention, relatives said. They said his father was in El Salvador and his mother was dead, and he had recently lived with his father’s cousin.