GoSkateDay – San Diego crime on wheels

In San Diego and Tijuana, dozens of crimes happened on #GoSkateDay, June 21.

The perps and victims were skateboarders.

Between 4-5 pm, an unidentified "dog walker" lay on the cement of Balboa Park with blood oozing from his knees and his head or face.

"So allegedly, this guy punched one of the minors who was skating or hit them or pushed them, and then everybody surrounded him," William Dorsett said in his incriminating YouTube video of the incident posted later that Wednesday night. "Somebody jumped him, and now he's crying foul."

On Dorsett's 18-minute video, just a minute before the unidentified "dog walker" wearing a K9 design t-shirt was bum-rushed, he was arguing with the younger looking skateboarders. The skateboarders followed the dog walker as he walked away from the Bea Evenson Fountain in front of the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center close to Park Boulevard.

Then the dog walker "pushed a minor, and everyone circled him," Dorsett continued in a July 8 email to me. "At some point, they had him walking away, but his ego took over, and he went back into the crowd .... he takes a kid's skateboard and hits them with it, then they all attack him. At some point, after he gets into a headlock with a minor and bites the minor's leg, other minors start kicking him and punching him to get him off the kid."

In Dorsett's video, dozens of skateboarders had their phones out, recording the whole mob attack. "There was also a video of him using the skateboard on a kid, but that video was taken down off of Tik-Tok, but if you search, you can find more."

Some of the skateboarders immediately took off while the dog walker was getting jumped.

Dorsett — a spray paint artist from Clairemont who paints on skateboards and canvasses — continued: "Eventually someone drags him off by the hair, then he limps away and falls face first on the concrete."

The park rangers, who were watching from a distance, finally intervened.

"You were surrounding me and threatening me," yelled the dog walker in the video. "You did nothing, correct? You are not on a high horse."

Known as el día del skate on the other side of the border, skateboarders didn't commit crimes per se. They are depicted in photos posted on Facebook bombing a Tijuana hill and weaving through traffic.

Then, back in the U.S., "skaters went into a 7-Eleven in Little Italy and [burglarized] the 7-Eleven," continued Dorsett from the Balboa Park incident. "I saw several people in that video that were at the Go Skate Day in Balboa Park, and even a couple of them were people I talked to on camera."

Robert Paladino, who lives in Little Italy, was picking up a Gatorade inside the convenience store. While the "40" skaters entered the 7-Eleven, looted what they could with the other hand holding the skateboard, and quickly jetted out the door. Paladino recorded what he could. "The store employee couldn’t do anything," Paladino told me in a July 10 interview. "He called the police, and they wouldn’t come because they claimed it wasn’t an emergency ... [the skaters] were outside laughing."

Later that night, an Imperial Beach mom warned other skateboarder parents online. Her 16-year-old son was riding his skateboard that Wednesday night when "a white van pulled over, and a male jumped out of a sliding door side and grabbed my son, yanking him and trying to throw him in the van." The mom didn't respond to my inquiry, but online, she said her son escaped and that "police/detectives are investigating."

While there are no updates online if any arrests were made regarding Go Skateboard Day crimes, there was another skateboard-related crime on June 25. A South Park woman posted in part online, "I was unloading my band gear ... and I noticed two men skating by on their skateboards. I had a total of 4 speakers; while I was taking in two, one of the [skaters] came back." She left the other pair of speakers on the sidewalk. "And [he] took one of them. This guy had some nerve stealing a speaker right out from under my nose."