In assembling a case against a group accused of beating a passenger aboard a city bus, police had to sort through conflicting statements from middle school students who appeared streetwise beyond their years.
In interrogation rooms, detectives faced off against recalcitrant children as young as 14 who remained defiant even as interrogators threatened them with adult charges and warned that their friends might be giving them up in a room next door.
One 14-year-old boy repeatedly told a Maryland Transit Administration Police sergeant that he saw the fight on the No. 27 bus in Hampden but couldn't name the people involved.
"They go to my school, but I don't hang with them," he said after the officer insinuated that he was lying because the boy refused to make eye contact.
"You know the guys you catch the bus with all the time," the sergeant said. "You see their faces all the time. Even if you don't know their last names, you know their first names. Is it that you don't want to tell me, is that it?"
The boy answered: "No, I ain't going to put them out there like that."
Hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The Sun recount police interviews in which the Robert Poole Middle School students accused in the December attack on Sarah Kreager and her boyfriend, Troy Ennis, tried to stonewall authorities.
Girls told stories that didn't match, and at one point, while they were in a holding cell, a city police officer watched them mimic the beating they were accused of carrying out -- laughing as they threw kicks and punches into the air.
Despite weeks of testimony and a ruling Tuesday by a juvenile court judge, who found five teens responsible in various ways for what 911 callers described as a riot, key details remain unclear, and those involved on both sides remain deeply divided over whether justice has been achieved.
"I didn't think it was fair," said the father of one of the boys who was found responsible. "From looking at the evidence, there wasn't any."
The judge, prosecutors and the bus driver disagreed. Danny Williams, 49, had worked as a correctional officer before he signed on to drive a bus.
Fights he witnessed in jail couldn't compare to the melee that left his bus in tatters -- a window shattered, seats torn and the back door left hanging from its hinges. Williams said in an interview, "If they kicked that woman a little higher in the head, she would've been brain dead."
