(Reuters) – Las Vegas police have arrested eight teenagers in the fatal beating of high school student Jonathan Lewis and continue to search for two more suspects connected to what began as a dispute over a pair of headphones and escalated into a brutal assault, authorities said this week.
Approximately 10 people can be seen attacking Lewis, 17, in a widely circulated video of the Nov. 1 fight that left him with “non-survivable head trauma,” Las Vegas law enforcement officials said at a press conference on Tuesday.
They said the eight teenagers arrested so far, ranging in age from 13 to 17, would face murder charges.
The confrontation, which occurred in a back alley near Rancho High School, started over a pair of wireless headphones and possibly a vape pen stolen from Lewis or his friends, authorities said.
Immediately after Lewis and another student began to fight, the video shows, the rest of the students swarmed him, pulled him to the ground, “and began kicking, punching, and stomping on him,” said Las Vegas police homicide Lieutenant Jason Johansson at Tuesday’s press conference.
Two people in the video still have not been positively identified, officials said.
“If you, or your child, or somebody you know has seen that video and recognizes anybody that may have been a participant in this senseless crime, you need to get a hold of us,” said Andrew Walsh, undersheriff with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, at the conference.
Johansson also urged the public to share any additional videos of the incident that might be circulating online. “There’s a high likelihood that there’s additional video out there that we don’t have,” he said.
An autopsy performed by the Clark County coroner on Monday determined that Lewis’ cause of death was homicide by blunt force trauma, Johansson said.
(Reporting by Julia Harte; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
