While closing Flanigan Park for the evening at 8:00pm, 76-year old Richard Parker was attacked by a group of unruly individuals.
According to police in Williamsport, a 76-year-old man was attacked while he was attempting to lock the playground area where he works at.
Officials say that the man was later treated for sustained injuries that were caused by a group of unruly individuals who assaulted the man for having to close the playground for the day.
What’s more unsettling is that one among the group posted the assault on social media.
76-year-old worker attacked at playground | https://t.co/reBAGpYEY7 @CompoundBoss “ a group of “people” https://t.co/ul5ZrGrPze
— mattyc (@mattsee23) August 27, 2020
Richard Parker was the man attacked at the Flanigan Playground and the basketball courts on August 25th.
Parker is in charge of opening and closing the park in question and was proceeding to lock the gates up at 8:00 p.m. that evening when a group of people started to harass him for simply closing up the park and court.
On the video posted to social media, you can see the group mock the elderly man, and then suddenly a basketball is thrown at the side of his head, causing him to fall to the ground. Parker recalled the incident when speaking with a local news crew about the assault:
“Out of nowhere, a ball come and hit me in the side of the head. I went back to the fence and fell down. It hurt.”
If that weren’t enough, Parker also stated that some from the group even attempted to run him over with the bikes they had as well:
“I come over to the group over here, and they had bikes, they tried to run me over twice.”
Tony Parker, one of the sons of the victim, said he actually saw the video posted online where his father was attacked:
“I just lost it, you know, I started making phone calls, and I called him yelling at him for not calling me.”
From what Parker said about his job, this wasn’t the first time he was attacked. The victim stated that he was also attacked on July 3rd, where while he was locking up the gate to the park an assailant threw an M-80 at him:
“On the third of July, I was locking the main gate, and when I did that, somebody threw M-80s at me. It landed behind me, and the shrapnel came up and hit me in the legs.”
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