The five White men charged with beating a Black man and pushing him onto the train tracks at the Wood Street T-Station in May will go to trial in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court Feb. 16.
During an August preliminary hearing before Judge Oscar Petite the victim, Kevin Lockett said he remembered very little of the actual attack in which he suffered multiple facial-bone fractures while being beaten unconscious.
Based on video from Port Authority cameras on the platform, prosecutors have charged 21-year-old Ryan Kyle with attempted homicide, aggravated assault, and ethnic intimidation in the May 30 incident.
Lockett said he had gotten on the T at the North Side station May 30 and meant to get off at Gateway, but the crowd—mostly from a Kenny Chesney concert at PNC Park—blocked him, so he continued on to Wood Street.
During the ride, he said he heard racial slurs coming from someone in the group, but he could not say whom. When he got off, the others left through a different door.
Video from the station camera shows Kyle grabbing Lockett and throwing him onto the tracks. Lockett gets back up and tries to retrieve his cooler full of food and beer; Kyle hits him, knocking him to the platform where he continues hitting him. He and his friends then tried to leave with Lockett’s cooler.
But thanks to 911 calls from witnesses with cell phones, Port Authority Police arrived before Lyle and his accomplices could even leave the station. David Depretis, 21, Kenneth Gault, 21, Christopher LaPlace, 23, and his brother Matthew, 21, all face charges of aggravated assault, robbery and disorderly conduct.
Kyle’s attorney Al Burke, who is Black and a former prosecutor, said without any audio, the ethnic intimidation charges may be hard to prove.
“But the video evidence is hard to refute,” he said.
The video actually helped Kyle by showing he did not touch Lockett’s cooler. That led to the robbery change against him being dropped.
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