Davis Islands dog park attack: Teen suspects facing upgraded charges as adults
The Brief
All five teens arrested in the Davis Islands Dog Park attack have now been charged as adults. An 18-year-old was also arrested in this case.
Most of the teens are also facing upgraded charges from the Hillsborough State Attorney's Office.
Video sent anonymously to FOX 13 showed the chaos that unfolded last week when a group of teens were seen beating another teenager unconscious.
TAMPA, Fla. - Five teens arrested for beating another teenager in the Davis Islands Dog Park attack that happened last week have all been charged as adults by the Hillsborough State Attorney's Office.
What we know
All five teens who were arrested have been identified as 17-year-old Owen Callahan, 17-year-old Jacob Ely, 16-year-old Joseph Gesuale, 16-year-old Jace Villanueva and 15-year-old Grayson Shearer. The Hillsborough State Attorney's Office also said an 18-year-old, Orian Robinson, was also arrested in the brutal attack.
READ:Davis Islands attack: Social media message reveals threats, racist comments from victim to one of the suspects
The backstory
This comes after a video shared anonymously with FOX 13 showed the chaos that unfolded last Thursday at the dog park. According to detectives, the night began with everyone involved in the incident gathering for a bonfire at Davis Islands.
The cell phone video, confirmed by the Tampa Police Department to be part of their investigation, shows the chaos that ended the night. A group of teenagers, which includes one person holding a knife, could be seen surrounding a black pickup truck with a teenage driver and passenger. Police said another teenager threw a rock, which can be heard hitting the vehicle.
PREVIOUS:Sixth teenager arrested for brutal Davis Islands dog park attack
Moments later, the video shows several teens attacking the passenger, including another person holding a knife. The victim was pulled from the truck and beaten until he was unconscious.
Police arrested six of the suspected attackers, and all were charged with battery or assault and a 17-year-old faced an attempted murder charge.
Dig deeper
However, the Hillsborough State Attorney's Office said most of the teens are facing upgraded charges with the news that each of the suspects will be charged as adults. Prosecutors said Thursday night in a press release, "Our prosecutors have reviewed the facts and evidence, including several videos of the incident, which are difficult to watch."
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Prosecutors said they will be required by Florida law to ask the judge to hold each of the teens behind bars until trial, but they said a judge will make the final decision in the coming days.
Each of the teens charged will now face the following charges:
Callahan – attempted murder in the first-degree.
Ely – attempted murder in the first-degree, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and throwing a deadly missile at within or into a vehicle.
Gesuale – attempted murder in the first-degree and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
Villanueva – attempted murder in the first-degree and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
Shearer – attempted murder in the first-degree.
Robinson – felony battery and burglary with a battery.
The Source
The information in this story was released by the Hillsborough State Attorney's Office. It also includes previous reporting of this case. FOX 13's Aaron Mesmer contributed to this story.
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Baker writes damningly about the intellectual cowardice and inconsistency that set the stage for the city of Charlottesville's and University of Virginia's mismanagement of Unite the Right: At both the march and the rally, police not only failed to defend the counterprotesters, who were left to protect themselves against heavily armed, malevolent throngs, but, in some instances, attacked them. The author knows some of that inconsistency personally, which is the other distinctive piece of her approach. She grew up partly in Albemarle County, Virginia, where Charlottesville sits. Her father, though he came from a family of New England abolitionists, was also raised there, and he lends the book a telling moment. In 1968, when Baker was in elementary school, he published a 'thin volume' called Strike the Tent: In the Steps of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. 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She suggests that for white Charlottesvillians, a real reckoning with history would involve not only removing Confederate statues, which the city did in 2021, but confronting the toxic effects of Virginian exceptionalism: state, city, and university authorities' refusal to admit the presence of hate; white Charlottesvillians' unwillingness to listen to Black ones; an overriding inability to react to new information. Of course, the whole country suffers from these issues. We always have. One of Charlottesville's central arguments is that the nation's refusal to reckon with history is connected to its most violent, authoritarian elements. Donald Trump, of course, is radically anti-historical. 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A University of Virginia graduate and professional hate-monger who coined the term 'alt-right,' he was, in 2017, as Baker writes, 'openly audition[ing] for the role of Trump's brain.' He was also adopting harassment techniques he'd learned from Gamergate, the concerted threatening, stalking, and doxing of the game designer Zoë Quinn in 2014. In writing about Spencer, Baker decodes an aspect of Unite the Right that initially bewildered her. Early in Charlottesville, she writes that after the virulent antisemitism of the torch march, she 'was hard pressed to see the connection between Charlottesville's Confederate statues and Hitler Youth, between Southern white supremacy and European fascism. Which histories—whose histories—were in play?... It felt as though American and European national creeds were being remixed and weaponized in ways I couldn't wrap my mind around.' 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There, the alt-right mob encountered no resistance from the University of Virginia's authorities—its president, Baker writes, assumed that because Spencer was an alum, he'd abide by the university's honor code—or from Charlottesville and Virginia police. Baker draws a direct line from the city's underwhelming response to the statue debate sparked by Zyahna Bryant to its failure to prepare properly for Unite the Right, although police intelligence analysts and anti-fascist activists had given warning. The city and state governments and police chiefs just didn't want to take seriously the threat that the alt-right posed. And the Unite the Right organizers applied for, and got, a permit for their march. In the city's eyes, this entitled them to do what they liked, even as their rally turned into a violent and then murderous riot. Meanwhile, the unarmed Charlottesvillians who opposed the white supremacists received no police protection. 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She talks to a local arts administrator who turned into an activist after the statue debate, the founding members of Charlottesville's chapters of Black Lives Matter and Showing Up for Racial Justice, and citizen journalists who captured the riot in real time. Many of these people were both physically and morally wounded that weekend. Andy Stepanian, an activist who helped manage the counterprotesters' crisis communications, told Baker that, when he saw Heyer receiving chest compressions, it was as if his brain 'short-circuited. From that moment he lost the ability to live in the here and now. It has never returned.' All those decisions—even, or especially, the ones that don't feel like decisions at all—create room for fascism to flourish. Charlottesville is not a book of the here and now. It's too wide-ranging for that. In all its movement through time, through archives and forums and the intellectual history of America's ugliest movements, it seeks to locate 'the germ of the present in the past'—a mission of which Baker declares herself skeptical; maybe, she writes, it's 'just something writers tell themselves to exert control over events that are effectively beyond their control. But it was what I knew.' It's also a way of looking into the future. By linking Spencer to Pound, Baker demonstrates that American fascism is hardly newer than its Italian and German inspirations; by highlighting Pound's Jeffersonian pretensions, she reminds us of how deeply the crime of slavery affects not just the nation's founding philosophies but their later uses; and by tying the Jefferson-Pound-Spencer lineage to gamer culture, she reminds us how contemporary—how online—these problems are. Unite the Right happened through the internet. So did Trump's electoral victories. He's handed the reins of government, it seems, to alt-right activists who agitate on social media; he's letting Elon Musk, a tech billionaire who promotes far-right parties around the world and celebrated Trump's inauguration with a Nazi salute, dismantle the civil service. Charlottesville tells us how the country got here: by kowtowing to guns, by refusing to accept responsibility for racism close to home, by too many people ignoring what they don't want to see and not taking seriously what they don't want to hear. All those decisions—even, or especially, the ones that don't feel like decisions at all—create room for fascism to flourish, just as Charlottesville's white supremacists took the town's foot-dragging on removing the Lee statue as an opening to wave guns and Confederate flags in public parks. At the very end of the book, Baker challenges readers to attend closely not only to the hateful currents she investigates in chilling detail, but to the activists who resisted them in Charlottesville and continue to do so to this day. She is clear that these activists are responding to a deeply entrenched hate that preceded them and is more powerful than them—so powerful that its representatives are now in Congress and the White House. Yet these grassroots movements, she thinks, are our only hope. She writes that we must listen to them. 'We must regard them not as radicals … but as ordinary Americans standing up and fighting in a myriad of ways for what is right.' At this point, we've all got to do the same.
