A man was brutally attacked by a group of fellow passengers on a Dallas Area Rapid Transit train, apparently for simply asking the group to stop smoking weed on the train.
The man, who has chosen to be identified only as “Kennan,” was left motionless, barely conscious, after the attack that started on a Green Line train Sunday night.
“In my mind I was like, ‘Just don’t pass out. Just don’t pass out. God, don’t let them kill me,’” Kennan told NBCDFW.
The 44-year-old said he was outnumbered and beaten by a group of people who were smoking as they boarded the train at Baylor University Medical Center around 11:25 p.m. Sunday.
“When they started smoking, I’m like, ‘Come on, man. We’re on a train. Can y’all just wait? Just wait,’” he said.
After that simple encounter, all hell broke loose. Kennan said that he remembered a young woman confronting him, even going so far as to spit in his face.
“She ended up spitting in my face,” he said. “I was like, ‘You lucky I don’t hit females, little girl, because I would beat your ass for that.’ And that’s when everything went from zero to 100.”
In a now-viral video of the incident, some five to seven individuals can be seen pummeling Kennan, repeatedly punching, slapping and kicking him as he tries to defend himself.
When the train stopped at the next station, the fight spilled out onto the platform, where he was again brutally beaten before being hit over the head with a skateboard.
The group of attackers then piled back onto the train and continued on their journey as if they didn’t just beat a man to within an inch of his life. Kennan was left motionless on the platform.
“When we saw them tumble out onto the station, DART police were notified immediately,” Mark Ball, a spokesman for DART, told the news station. “Within 10 minutes, we had officers there.”
DART is investigating the attack. Ball acknowledged that the transit system took little action at first because there were no surveillance cameras inside the trains and authorities could only go off of surveillance video from the platform. Footage of the beatdown on the platform clearly showed Kennan being repeatedly struck—including with a skateboard—several times.
“We were reviewing it,” Ball said.
When video taken inside the train surfaced on social media this week, Ball said, officials immediately started to look into the incident.
“We made it a much more vigorous effort to try and get it resolved,” he said, adding that the department did not act sooner because the victim refused to pursue charges.
Kennan, however, refutes that claim.
“I never said no,” he said.
Read more at NBCDFW.