Teenagers, Racism And a Brutal Attack

Her statement ignited Tuck. His first punch was so powerful, it broke the 17-year-old's cheekbone and knocked him unconscious, said James H. "Red" Duke Jr., the emergency physician who treated him.

Tuck and Turner dragged the victim outside.

For the next five hours, they tortured him: They stripped him naked, kicked him with steel-toed boots, burned him with cigarettes and choked him with a garden hose. Tuck shouted racial epithets and carved a swastika in the boy's chest with a knife.

Turner grabbed a plastic patio umbrella pole and placed it near the victim's rectum. Tuck kicked the pole several inches in.

Both Tuck and Turner were convicted of aggravated sexual assault. Turner's trial revealed a boy who came from a relatively stable home and had minor run-ins with the law, but no history of racist violence. He seemed to be a follower caught up in a nightmare. Still, he was sentenced last month to 90 years in prison.

The 17-year-old victim, whom the Associated Press is not naming because of the sexual nature of the attack, lay in a hospital bed for three months.

The plastic pole perforated his bladder and caused extensive internal damage. The night after the assault, his lungs failed and he was placed on a ventilator.

Albert and Laticia Galvan, the aunt and uncle who raised him from infancy, kept watch over his hospital bed. They looked at his bruised face and his bloated body, and fought the questions jabbing through their thoughts like barbed wire.

Would he make it through the night? Through the week? If he did, would the outgoing, always smiling teenager ever be the same?

"I didn't think he was going to make it," Laticia Galvan recalled on the witness stand. "I didn't want to think about that. I wondered if mentally, is he going to be okay? I wasn't sure if he'd ever be able to walk again."

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The two teenagers grew up four miles apart, in a modest neighborhood of well-tended lawns and winding cul-de-sacs.