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8 Fla. Teens Busted For Taped Beating

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Apr 8, 2008 2:57 pm US/Eastern

8 Fla. Teens Busted For Taped Beating

 CBS News Interactive: Children In Danger

LAKELAND, Fla. (CBS) ― Eight teenagers have been arrested after filming the beating of another teen and threatening to post the video on the Internet, sheriff's officials said.

Victoria Lindsay was attacked on March 30 by six teenage girls when she arrived at a friend's home, the Polk County Sheriff's Office said.

Two girls confronted Lindsay when she walked in, yelling and threatening her, an arrest report showed. Another girl struck her in the head several times and then slammed her head into the bedroom wall, knocking her unconscious.

When she woke up, she was on the couch in the living room surrounded by the six girls. The teens blocked the door, held Lindsay down and began beating her, the report said. Two teenage boys waited outside the home as lookouts.

"That is animalistic behavior. It's pack mentality. They lured her there to beat her," Sheriff Grady Judd said.

Portions of the video were released by the sheriff's office and posted on CBS affiliate WTSP-TV.

"There was talk about apparently after the fact, apparently there's other students that knew that they were going to post this just for the thrill of everyone to see it," Lindsay's mother, Talisa, told CBS News' The Early Show. "Which is just outrageous."

All eight were charged last week with battery and false imprisonment, which are third-degree felonies, the report said.

"When we had them in custody at the station, they were laughing about it, saying, 'Well, I guess this spring break we won't go to the beach," Judd told The Early Show. "One of the suspects asked the detective, 'Am I going to get to go to cheerleading practice tomorrow?"

"They showed absolutely no remorse at all," Judd said.

Lindsay was taken to the hospital by ambulance and treated for a concussion, damage to her left eye and left ear, and numerous bruises, the report said.

Lindsay's father, Patrick, said the teens' motivation for the attack was to produce a video that would become popular on YouTube, a video-sharing Web site.

He told The Early Show that he has not been able to watch the video, that he is too distraught, although his wife has.

"I want stiffer punishments for these shock Web sites that entice kids to make these videos so they can be famous on the Internet," Patrick told The Ledger of Lakeland, Fla. "That is the motive, I am sure of it. It's crazy and it's terrible and they're gonna pay."

But the mother of one of the girls said that Lindsay had provoked the other teens by threatening and insulting them on MySpace, a social networking Web site.

After the girls were arrested, Christina Garcia told the newspaper she looked at Lindsay's MySpace page and saw the message: "hahaha all in jail."

"A lot of people think, 'I can say whatever I want on here and nobody's gonna say anything,'" Garcia said. "A fight is a fight, but this was a beatdown. She did not deserve what she got, but I don't know how she's that messed up and able to get on the computer and talk about that."

(© 2010 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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