Racism

SEATTLE - A 16-year-old boy from West Seattle says he was held hostage and beaten for hours, all because of the color of his skin.

Shane McClellan says two men kicked and whipped him at gunpoint - and told him they singled him out because he is white.

Tim McClellan, Shane's father, says he barely recognized his son after the brutal assault.

"I didn't know if he was alive or dead," Tim McClellan said.

The incident happened as Shane McClellan was walking home from a birthday party at a friend's house Tuesday around 2 a.m.

Shane says two men called to him from the top of a staircase near the intersection of 14th Avenue SW and SW Holden Street. The men asked for a light, and when Shane walked over to oblige, they knocked him to the ground and started kicking him.

The two men knocked the frightened teen around on the staircase, making racially charged remarks.

"They started bringing up the past - like slavery - being like, white people did this," Shane said in an exclusive interview with KOMO News reporter Shomari Stone.

The attackers stripped off McClellan's belt and started whipping his back.

"They said, 'This is for what your people did to our people.' They were like whipping me with my belt, my studded belt," Shane recounts.

One of the men held a gun against the back of his head and burned his neck with cigarettes.

At one point they shoved McClellan's face into a hole with the gun against his head. They also urinated on him and poured beer over him.

"What he told me, when they were beating him with the belt, they were saying, 'I don't like white people,'" says Shane's father, Tim McClellan.

Shane recalls, "They're like, 'Aw, white boy, what are you doing? You can't hang out this late. What are you doing around here?' They're like, 'White boy has no belonging - being out here at 2 a.m.'"

"They targeted me for being white, and they made it very clear thats why they were assaulting me," Shane says.

The boy told police that one of his attackers appeared to be black and the other Asian or Pacific Islander.

The victim's father says this was nothing short of hours of torture.

"Put a gun to the back of his head and told him if he said anything they were going to blow his head off while they sat there and burned him with cigarettes on the back of the neck," he says.

The two assailants held the victim on the ground for some time, and Shane eventually passed out.

When he regained consciousness, the attackers were gone. They had taken his money, a coat and an MP3 player.

Shane waved down a passing car for help and met his family at the hospital.

Seattle police have referred the case to their Bias Crimes Unit for review as a possible hate crime.

Detectives told the family they are working on a photo montage of possible suspects - and will see if the victim is able to identify his attackers from the line-up.

Shane is now out of the hospital and recovering at home.

But he gets chills when he looks at the photos that were taken of him right after the attack.

"Gets me shaken up every time I see it," he says. "I don't know, I just get vibes overall from seeing those pictures."

He says he has learned not to wander through the neighborhood at 2 in the morning - and he hopes his attackers are caught and charged with a hate crime.