Hi! I live in Philly. This has really taken over our area. People are really obsessed with it. It has been a long time since I can remember a crime gripping the region like this. Maybe since Eddie Polec? (He was a high school kid who was beaten to death in a brawl in the 90s.)
I don't know any of these people. But I just wanted to give some local color for people not from here.
1) Bucks County is a really big area. There is "Lower Bucks" and "Upper Bucks."
2) Lower Bucks are the towns closest to Philly. Lower Bucks surrounds Northeast Philly, which are mostly middle class city neighborhoods. Think of where firefighters would live. The town where a lot of these kids all come from is Bensalem. A lot of families in Bensalem originally come from NE Philly. Even if they make decent money, they still have a pretty blue-collar edge. And Bensalem isn't a suburb where there are a lot of million dollar homes. (Or at all.) It's way more middle/working class. There are also a lot of immigrant families from India. It really bleeds into NE Philly a lot and if you didn't know where the border was you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between city and 'burbs. A lot of people from Bensalem just give off a tough city person vibe.
I have a friend who went to BHS with the mother of one of the victims. I don't know what one. But she got pregnant w/ him when she was 14-15 and had a real rough upbringing. I also saw that the kid they released the obit for lived with his grandparents. Backgrounds like that are pretty common in Lower Bucks.
3) Lower Bucks has a reputation of having a really bad drug problem. There's a neighborhood in Philly called Kensington that is arguably the biggest open air heroin drug market in the country. It's right down I-95 from Bensalem and, without traffic, is 20 minutes away. Not that these kids are on heroin, but you can really find any sort of drug or drug connection really quickly.
4) Some of the kids going to Bensalem High and Holy Ghost and mixing together isn't surprising. I went to a Catholic college in Philly and there were a lot of Holy Ghost kids. I never got the vibe it was a preppy rich kid high school like St. Joe's Prep or La Salle High or something out on the Main Line. But kids from public and Catholic schools all mixing isn't shocking. The kids who know each other have known each other since birth, probably, and just went to different schools for whatever family reason.
5) There is a big dirtbike/ATV scene in Philly itself. If you drive around certain inner city neighborhoods, you'll see dozens of dirtbike/ATVs being driven around. And they're sort of notorious for all getting into fights with each other. The brother of a a NBA player from Philly (Dion Waters) was an ATV guy and got shot by someone in a rival group.
These groups are mostly black kids in their late-teens/early-20s. But sometimes you'll see a few white kids mixed in with them. That a few kids who seem pretty hard are riders isn't shocking.
6) They found the bodies in Solesbury, which is not Lower Bucks and a lot different. It's wealthy suburbs/semi-rural land that a real estate developer hasn't snatched up yet. It's right next to New Hope, which is a tourist town with a bustling main street that has nice restaurants and etc. Peddler's Village where they found one of the cars is a touristy shopping plaza where they have things like antique shops or artisanal candles or places where you can buy fudge. It's a really popular bus trip for seniors' groups, for example.
7) Someone from Bensalem being rich enough to own a $5 million plot of land in Solesbury sounds weird to people not from here but it makes sense. There are a lot of people like that are Philly -- folks who grew up in the city and own a successful blue-collar business and do really well for themselves, but you'd have no idea they were rich. Some of the families flash their money in sort of ridiculous ways. Cosmo's shoe collection comes to mind -- Jordan's are like $500 a pop. Sneaker heads drop a lot of money.
8) Temple University where the fight went down at is a gigantic sorta-state school. It has something like 30,000 kids. EVERYONE knows someone who goes to Temple. It's also surrounded by some of the roughest parts of North Philly. It's notorious for neighborhood kids jumping students. They had a mini-riot there last year where a bunch of neighborhood kids randomly assaulted Temple students. Or a lot of off-campus houses are on blocks that are really rough. They essentially have a public housing complex right in the middle of the campus. And if you have to drive through that area, you'll see ATV/dirtbike kids around. It's really common.
So BR jumping a kid at 3 AM who was hanging around Temple with his cousins at a party -- that all checks out.
Just some local flavor for people not from here, since this thing is blowing up and looks like it's the second biggest news story going on right now after politics.
