11-Year-Old Black Boy Charged With Torching Crown Heights Jewish School Bus
Image by YouTube
An 11-year-old boy has been charged with hate crimes and police were searching for five other youths suspected of helping torch a school bus outside a Jewish school in Brooklyn, a spokeswoman for the New York Police Department said on Tuesday.
Surveillance video showed six youths packing cardboard into the yellow school bus parked outside Beth Rivkah, a private girls school, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn on Sunday night. Moments after they exited the bus, a blaze erupted inside and the vehicle was soon engulfed in flames, the video showed.
Following an investigation by the NYPD hate crimes task force, the boy, described as 11 years old and black, was charged on Monday with criminal mischief and arson, both as a hate crime, said Detective Annette Shelton.
Racial tensions between Orthodox Jews and African Americans in Crown Heights have flared over the years but recently have eased as the neighborhood, like much of Brooklyn, has become more gentrified.
Police on Tuesday sought five other black youths in the arson crime, and released their photos from the video in their request for information from the public.
Authorities said no one was hurt in the incident but the bus was damaged.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism so that we can be prepared for whatever news 2025 brings.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
