W. Seattle Teen Beaten Bloody in Possible Hate Crime

A 16-year-old boy from West Seattle says he was held hostage and beaten for hours, all because of the color of his skin.

Shane McClellan says two men kicked and whipped him at gunpoint–and told him they singled him out because he is white.

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The incident happened as Shane McClellan was walking home from a birthday party at a friend’s house Tuesday around 2 a.m.

Shane says two men called to him from the top of a staircase near the intersection of 14th Avenue SW and SW Holden Street. The men asked for a light, and when Shane walked over to oblige, they knocked him to the ground and started kicking him.

The two men knocked the frightened teen around on the staircase, making racially charged remarks.

“They started bringing up the past–like slavery–being like, white people did this,” Shane said in an exclusive interview with KOMO News reporter Shomari Stone.

The attackers stripped off McClellan’s belt and started whipping his back.

“They said, ‘This is for what your people did to our people.’ They were like whipping me with my belt, my studded belt,” Shane recounts.

One of the men held a gun against the back of his head and burned his neck with cigarettes.

At one point they shoved McClellan’s face into a hole with the gun against his head. They also urinated on him and poured beer over him.

“What he told me, when they were beating him with the belt, they were saying, ‘I don’t like white people,'” says Shane’s father, Tim McClellan.

Shane recalls, “They’re like, ‘Aw, white boy, what are you doing? You can’t hang out this late. What are you doing around here?’ They’re like, ‘White boy has no belonging–being out here at 2 a.m.'”

“They targeted me for being white, and they made it very clear that’s why they were assaulting me,” Shane says.

The boy told police that one of his attackers appeared to be black and the other Asian or Pacific Islander.

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The two assailants held the victim on the ground for some time, and Shane eventually passed out.

When he regained consciousness, the attackers were gone. They had taken his money, a coat and an MP3 player.

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Seattle police have referred the case to their Bias Crimes Unit for review as a possible hate crime.

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