attacks

11th Grader Rito Osorio Was Gay Bashed In The School Bathroom (For Spreading Gay Rumors?)

Won’t anybody from the Family Research Council stand up and say Rito Osorio, a sophomore at Silver Creek High School in southern Indiana, brought it upon himself when he got gay bashed by a classmate? C’mon, Bigot Inc., where are you on this one?

Rito’s alleged attacker, who isn’t named in this WAVE 3 news report, is a 16-year-old fellow student at the Sellersburg, has been arrested and is being held in a juvenile facility. Meanwhile Rito, who is openly gay, has been left with a broken nose, fractures in his facial bones, and a brutal piercing injury after being lured into the bathroom — where a crowd of spectators was waiting.

When Silver Creek sophomore Rito Osorio was eating lunch on Thursday, he says a 16-year-old classmate came up, tapped him on the shoulder, and told him that they needed to talk. He says he asked him to follow him to the bathroom. “I followed him in there and when I got in there it was pretty much packed,” said Osorio. “It was full of eyes just watching.” Osorio says then the boy started punching him and calling him names, leaving him with several face fractures and a broken nose.

“He had a piercing under his lip, and that had been pushed up into the maxilla bone and chipped it, so it is stuck up there and is going to have to be surgically removed,” said the victim’s mother Andrea Osorio. His mother says she can’t believe this happened. “I really believe that he was targeted.” His clothes are now the evidence of a violent beating. Osorio is openly gay, and he believes that’s why he was singled out by his attacker. “We just need to be more tolerate as people,” said Osorio.

So what could the attacker’s M.O. have been? Osorio reveals “people have been telling him that I’ve been talking about him saying that he was gay or something, but I haven’t been saying that.” The cops say otherwise. Sellersburg Police Chief Russ Whelan: “[The attacker] was upset with the rumors that were going around the school about him that were coming from this other boy and he decided to take matters into his own hands. … The decision you make to go in the bathroom and beat on someone as this boy did could ultimately affect him for the rest of his life.”

Should gay kids go around school calling other people gay? No, and it’s unclear whether Rito ever did that. Either way, we’re all going to be in agreement that even if Rito was spreading rumors, beating up another kid at school is never appropriate, regardless of the reasons behind it. Keep your head up, Rito, and good on you for sharing your story. You’re a brave young man.

Now let’s see how school administrators handle this one. Is that a carpet that needs sweeping under? Let’s find out.

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