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Charge filed against teen who recorded beating

BY ANDREW STRICKLER AND JOHN VALENTI | Newsday Staff Writers

12:06 PM EST, January 30, 2007

He was not a particant in the actual fight. But Suffolk County Police said Bryan Alomar was charged with a misdemeanor in the North Babylon schoolyard fight that has become a symbol of cyberbullying because he served as "the recorder" of events and therefore became a participant.

Alomar, 16, of Ryder Avenue was arrested Monday in conjunction with the vicious attack on a 13-year-old girl in the four-minute video that exploded onto the Internet earlier this month after being posted on several Web sites including YouTube.com and MySpace.com.

Charged with unlawful assembly, a Class B misdemeanor punishable by a maximum sentence of three months in jail, Alomar was released on a $100 stationhouse bond and is scheduled to appear in First District Court in Central Islip on March 22.

Tuesday morning, Lt. Robert Edwards, commander of the First Precinct Crime Division, explained the charges, saying: "Bryan Alomar was one of the people with knowledge that this event was going to occur. Bryan Alomar is a participant, not in the sense that he hit and pummeled the girl, but he was a participant."

Edwards described the charge of unlawful assembly as disorderly conduct involving at least five people and is typically used in cases like this -- where people gather for the purposes of a fight.

He noted that schools and schoolyards are often the scenes of similiar fights and that participants often go uncharged. However, charges were brought against Alomar and three other participants, Edwards said, because of the video evidence of the crime.

The attack occured on Dec. 18 outside Woods Elementary School in North Babylon. The victim and one of the girls seen attacking her had dated the same boy, police said.

The three girls involved in the attack, all first-year students at North Babylon High School, were arrested earlier this month and charged with juvenile deliquency with an underlying charge of third-degree assault. Those girls have been released into the custody of their parents and have been suspended from school.

Alomar also was suspended from school for five days, the maximum suspension for his actions in the incident, school officials told Newsday.

Neither Alomar's parents nor his attorney could be reached for comment.

Tuesday morning Edwards said police were not pressured by school district officials to prosecute Alomar for his participation in the incident. "There was no push from the school district one way or the other," Edwards said.

Police said they believe Alomar went to the scene of the fight with a camera intending to record the attack, but they do not know if he went there to record it with the intent of putting it on the Internet or if that decision came later on.