Joyce King may well have saved Sarah Kreager's life.
On Dec. 4, Kreager and her boyfriend, Troy Ennis, boarded the No. 27 Maryland Transit Administration bus heading toward downtown Baltimore. What happened after they boarded is in dispute. Kreager claims that when she sat down, some girls from Robert Poole Middle School told her to either move or be moved. Kreager said the girls, along with some boys from the school, attacked her and Ennis, leaving Kreager bleeding from head wounds, her left eye swollen shut and the socket broken in two places.
Six boys and three girls were eventually charged in the assault. Cases against three of the boys have been put on hold. One of the girls entered a guilty plea. An adjudicatory hearing that began Jan. 31 continued yesterday in Judge David Young's courtroom at the Juvenile Justice Center for the three boys and two girls still charged.
The first few weeks of the hearing, defense attorneys for the students made several motions to have evidence -- taped statements the teens made to Maryland Transit Administration detectives and identifications from photo arrays -- suppressed. Those statements were played in court. They diverged on minor points, but all claimed that Ennis told Kreager to "spit on those niggers" and that a fight started after Kreager did precisely that.
Several students said Kreager already had a black eye when she and Ennis got on the bus, and that she appeared to be angry with him. Defense attorneys for the five defendants -- called "respondents" in juvenile court -- scooped up those allegations like a fumbled football and ran with them. The focus of their defense is that Kreager sustained her eye injury before she was beaten by students, that the beating wasn't that severe and that Kreager and Ennis are, at best, unreliable witnesses.
Kreager testified Monday and Tuesday of this week. Ennis testified Thursday. King, the woman who witnessed the attack from her dining room window and dashed from her home screaming at the students to stop beating Kreager, testified yesterday.
King's house is at the corner of Chestnut Avenue and 33rd Street. The afternoon of Dec. 4, she said, she was in her dining room, weakened from bronchitis and about to take some medication, when she heard a loud noise outside.
"The bus had slammed into the curb," King testified. The No. 27 bus stops in front of her house, where she has lived with her husband for 10 years.
