Seven Arrested in Bronx Bashing Spree

Members of the Bronx-based Latin King Goonies street gang stand accused of a brutal gay-bashing spree that included sodomizing a 17-year-old boy with the wooden handle of a toilet plunger, police said Friday.

The New York Times'City Room blog reports police arrested seven young members of the Goonies, ranging from 16 to 23 years old, and charged them in connection with a series of attacks on two teenagers and a 30-year-old man in an unoccupied apartment.

The spree started last Sunday in the early morning when the Goonies grabbed the 17-year-old off the street, took him to an apartment in Morris Heights, and tried forcing him to confess to having performed sexual acts on a 30-year-old man, one official said at a news conference.

The boy, who was an aspiring Goonie, was "thrown into a wall, made to strip naked, hit in the head with a beer can, cut with a box cutter and sodomized with the wooden handle of a plunger," Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.

"These suspects deployed terrible, wolf pack odds of nine against one, which revealed them as predators whose crimes were as cowardly as they were despicable," Kelly said. Throughout the attack, he said, the Goonies used antigay slurs.

Two more suspects are still being sought in the case, according to the police.