‘Heart of a champion’: father grieves son beaten to death by mob in Las Vegas

A grieving father in Nevada has paid tribute to his 17-year-old son’s “heart of a champion” and denounced the scourge of teenage violence after the boy was beaten to death by a mob outside his high school for defending a smaller child.

Jonathan Lewis said his son – also named Jonathan – died at the University medical center in Las Vegas last Tuesday, one week after the attack involving about 15 others near the city’s Rancho high school.

Witnesses say the teenager was pushed into a fence then repeatedly struck by the members of the mob when he stood up for a younger friend who had been thrown into a trash can.

“Jonathan was a loving, giving, kind, fierce young man who loved community and caring for others,” the boy’s father wrote on a GoFundMe page raising money for his late son’s medical bills.

“This horrific tragedy is reflective of the divisive, conflict based, uncaring state that our society and humanity is currently facing. Empathy and love are great strength, and cowardly violence is pathetic. We denounce violence as a means to resolve sociological conflict.”

Police were called to reports of a mass brawl near the school on the afternoon of 1 November. Officers found Jonathan bleeding from head wounds and gave him CPR before he was taken to the hospital and placed on life support.

Video footage posted to social media purportedly of the attack shows him standing up to one youth, before more than a dozen others move in and knock him to the ground.

“A couple [of people] attacked him, and they weren’t able to hurt him enough, and they all attacked him at once,” the boy’s father told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

In the GoFundMe post, he said his son was “a fierce protector of loved ones” and a “kind, loving, gentle young man who has the heart of a champion and the brightest loving energy that attracts people to him with love”.

Detectives from the Las Vegas Metropolitan police department are investigating the incident, a spokesperson confirmed on Monday without giving any further details. The department had not made any arrests as of Friday, the Review-Journal reported.

Lewis Sr said his son wanted to join the US military and was preparing to come to live with him in Austin, Texas. He said he hoped his son’s death could be a catalyst for greater efforts to tackle a rising tide of youth-on-youth violence in Las Vegas and across the country.

“I think there’s just a failure of all of humanity to recognize that we need to be teaching our youth how to coexist,” he told Las Vegas TV station 8NewsNow.

A study published in April by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) called violence in the community “a significant public health concern”, and it revealed one in five high school students had witnessed or experienced violence first-hand.