More than $160,000 raised for victim of Chicago attack filmed on Facebook Live
A GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $160,000 in just one week for an 18-year-old who was recently held captive and assaulted by four people in Chicago.
A widely circulated Facebook Live video — which has since been removed — appeared to show the young man being tied up, beaten, cut, and verbally assaulted with anti-white slurs by a group of young African-American men and women. Last week, police arrested and charged four suspects with hate crimes, as well as counts of aggravated kidnapping, aggravated unlawful restraint, and aggravated battery.
Disturbed by the story, “Razor” Sheldon of San Francisco felt compelled to do something for the victim, who has a mental disability.
“Let’s prove to him that there is far more good in this world than the evil he recently endured,” Sheldon posted late last week in Reddit’s popular UpliftingNews forum, which he created in 2012.
According to the Washington Post, Sheldon initially called his online community to raise $5,000 as a gesture of support for the young man and his family, and he raised the number to $10,000 after donors quickly met and surpassed the initial goal. But the donations kept coming and, by Thursday morning, more than 5,000 people had raised more than $160,000.
“My clients are overwhelmed with the warm, kind generosity of perfect strangers,” Neal Strom, the family’s attorney, told the Chicago Sun-Times on Tuesday. “It just came out of the clear blue sky . . . it shows that there are good people out there, after all [the victim] has been through.”
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