Sunday, October 19, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

IN DEPTH: 311 BOYZ: Summer of violence

Teens' thirst for alcohol and violence culminates with near-deadly attack and

In images taken from the 311 Boyz videotape filed in Clark County District Court, a young man screams at friends one summer night in a Las Vegas park. In other parts of the now-infamous tape, boys and girls argue, drink beer, listen to music, wrestle and pummel one another. Seaneen DeFoor, mother of one of the first 311 Boyz convicted of a violent crime, phoned the parents of her son's friends to tell them their kids could be involved in a gang. Some of them laughed at her. "I tried to warn them," she said. Photo by Amy Beth Bennett.

They went to classes during the week and played football Friday nights. On the weekends, when their teachers and parents weren't watching, they slurped from beer bongs and raised a little hell. They spent so much time together partying that they gave their

clique a name.

Typical high schoolers, many would say. But somewhere along the way, something spun out of control, and a band of teenagers known as pleasure-seeking party animals became bloodthirsty thugs who

got off on videotaping violence. Before summer's end, nine would

be facing years in prison.

In the beginning

The origin of the group that would come to be known to Las Vegans as the 311 Boyz has its roots in an alcohol-soaked party during Christmas break last year. Hosted by a Centennial High School student, the bash lasted the entire time his parents were out of town vacationing.

"This guy Steve had a party that lasted four days," said Tasha McLaughlin, 16, a junior at Centennial.

Many of the friends who attended became closer as the week wore on, pledging to spend more time partying together. Then one of them hit upon an idea. "It just got brought up that we should have a crew," McLaughlin said, a story told by others who were there. "A lot of people are in cliques, and everybody in cliques call themselves something."

They settled on a name, which some say is a reference to a police code for indecent exposure. Others claim the name had more sinister origins in a reference to the Ku Klux Klan, or KKK, the 11th letter of the alphabet three times.

Most of the first 311 Boyz members were male students who had met through sports at Centennial. Some were wrestlers. "A lot of us were on the same teams," said Matt Reid, an athletic 18-year-old who was one of the first members. Reid, now a college freshman, played football and lacrosse with Anthony Gallion and football with Scott Morse, two of the teens now facing attempted murder charges.

"It started with just four boys who were going around calling themselves that," McLaughlin said. "Then a lot more people, whenever they would hang out with them, would start calling themselves 311."

By the time high school classes resumed in January, the 311 Boyz had doubled in size. "There was maybe 10 of us at the most," Reid said. Their membership now spread beyond Centennial students, and more girls were beginning to join the circle. Some attended Cimarron-Memorial, also in the northwest.

By early spring, group members increasingly were identifying themselves to other students as 311 Boyz. Some had "311" tattooed on a wrist, forearm or back. "I was with them when they went and got the tattoos in March or April," said Reid, who has four friends with 311 inked on their bodies. "I don't think anybody ever took on the role of leader. ... We'd just get together to party."

And party they did.

Most of the time, they gathered in posh homes across northwest Las Vegas. The frequency of festivities depended on opportunity -- someone's parents leaving town. When their parents didn't leave town, the 311 Boyz would.

Although not all came from affluent families, most of the members enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle. Comfortable enough to allow them to take numerous trips in the spring and summer, jaunts during which the 311 Boyz partied in at least three states and another country.

"Over spring break, almost all those guys came down with me to Mexico," Reid said, referring to the nine teens now facing criminal charges. They spent their days south of the border bronzing their bodies at Reid's father's villa in the coastal resort town of Puerto Penasco. A few months later, the 311 Boyz piled into cars and pickups for another holiday in the sun, spending Memorial Day weekend partying at Lake Havasu in Arizona, a popular spot for college students. In June, they would vacation in upscale Newport Beach, Calif.

Ashley Erickson recalls with fondness the 311 Boyz's getaways just outside of Las Vegas. "We'd all go on camping trips around here," she said.

"We'd always be going somewhere," Reid said. "We're all definitely on the better half when it comes to money."

Thirst for alcohol and blood

When classes let out for the summer, about 20 kids were calling themselves 311 Boyz. Over the following few weeks, their numbers swelled to at least 80.

"It started getting really big," said Lindsey Paterniti, one of the girls seen brawling on the now-infamous 311 Boyz videotape of fight footage.

"(More) people kept claiming 311. ... All these people were the popular people in school, and more people kept joining because they wanted to be popular."

Marijuana, Ecstasy and other drugs commonly linked to youth party culture in Las Vegas weren't apparent at the summer parties. "When I would go to parties, I just didn't see them," McLaughlin said.

No demand, therefore no supply. "A lot of these kids are Mormon," Erickson said. "They're basically good kids who would never use drugs."

Alcohol, however, was a different story. They had little trouble getting it, even though most of the 311 Boyz lacked fake IDs. The problem was easily surmounted with the help of friends over 21 who were more than happy to buy for them. "We didn't usually have kegs," McLaughlin said. "People would just bring their own stuff."

It's unclear why, as their numbers grew, the group shifted its focus from chugging beer to inciting violence. But some members observed a connection between an increasing thirst for alcohol and a thirst for blood.

The brutality that came to define the 311 Boyz was mild to nonexistent in the beginning. There was a fistfight, at most, every other weekend at one of their parties, and the brawls typically matched two willing participants who had a score to settle. "It was maybe four or five kids who fought a lot," Reid said. But when membership swelled in the summer, the amount of fighting swung upward. Fighting became a key element of the group's identity, and the quality of violence changed. Consensual fights were no longer the rule, and those with little hope of protecting themselves became targets of mob attacks.

"311 started to get bad over the summer," Erickson remembered.

Months earlier, students in the group had begun carrying camcorders to ensure the most outrageous antics of the parties were memorialized. When fights began regularly breaking out at the gatherings, the video documentation took on a new role. 311 Boyz began recording the brawls to later settle disputes between teens whose memories had been dimmed by heavy alcohol consumption. "Everybody started debating over who had won these fights," McLaughlin said. "So since we were already taping the party, they started taping the fights."

The initial party footage was boring. Choppily edited recordings of students standing around talking or making drunken jokes weren't much fun to watch. The new images were different, generating intense interest in watching them over and over, especially those showing lithe young girls beating each other senseless. "It got to where we were only taping the fights," McLaughlin said.

Some of the most explosive violence was never captured on camera. "Some were real awful," Erickson said about the fights. "One was, like, 10 against one. Most of the girls (watching) were screaming."

One melee broke out earlier this year in Summerlin at a home near Lake Mead and Rampart boulevards, where Reid had been invited to a birthday party for a Meadows School student. The birthday girl encouraged him to bring some of the boys in his crew. Reid demurred at first. "I said, `Trust me -- you don't want my friends to come because I know their habits with people they don't know. They start acting like hard asses, and then it's on,' " he recalled.

But the birthday girl insisted she wanted a large crowd. Eventually, Reid agreed to phone two or three friends. Minutes later, word of the party had spread like wildfire among a network of dozens of other teens linked by cell phones. "I invited a couple of my friends and then about 35 showed up," Reid said, laughing as he recalled the episode.

Soon, the mild gathering of a handful of private school students at a swank home erupted into a chaotic free-for-all. The 311 Boyz worked to see how far they could push things. "They started jumping off the roof into the pool," Reid said. A fight broke out after Meadows students asked 311 Boyz members to stop hurling themselves from the roof. "People were picking up chairs and breaking them over people," Reid said. "People are picking up beer bottles and slamming them over people's heads."

The 311 Boyz's inclination for such behavior soon earned them a reputation at other schools as unsavory party crashers.

"It's not like we were all bad kids who went out looking to hurt kids," Reid said. "We were just the more rowdy group of kids that showed up at parties, jumping off roofs into pools, bringing beer bongs. But it got out of hand. With that much alcohol and that many kids, you had to know something bad was going to happen."

Out of control

Between May and July, police investigated at least five group attacks that eventually would be linked to the 311 Boyz. "It just started getting ridiculous," Reid recalled. "The problem with 311 is that we would just jump kids. There would be more than one of us on top of a kid and if you couldn't handle your (expletive), then you'd be in it. It just got to be an everyday thing."

One of the first members to be arrested was Christopher Morgan, a 16-year-old who had a long and troubled history well before he hooked up with the 311 Boyz. "He was a handful," Morgan's mother, Seaneen DeFoor, said last month as she recounted the highlights of her son's years-long delinquency. Diagnosed a sociopath as a boy, Morgan was a drug dealer before he reached junior high school, selling the amphetamines he was prescribed for attention deficit disorder to other kids for five bucks a pop. He was arrested at 14 for stealing a car in California. The same year he was charged in a home burglary. In the later case, authorities found six other drugs besides speed in his system when he was booked into a juvenile jail.

Morgan landed behind bars in July following one of the first serious 311 Boyz assaults of which police took note. Sixteen-year-olds Nick Moya and Matt McClure were attacked near Ann Road and Jones Boulevard by a mob following a trivial argument over a girl. Morgan socked Moya with brass knuckles. Convicted of battery charges a few weeks later, Morgan is now incarcerated at a youth prison in Elko. "I'm sure he wishes he'd never heard of the 311 Boyz," DeFoor said.

No one else was charged, but the person who might be more responsible than any other for the notoriety of the 311 Boyz was arrested about the same time.

Most of the 311 Boyz fight footage that has now been repeatedly played on local and national news broadcasts was captured by Centennial student Chad Clatterbuck, according to interviews and police documents. Clatterbuck, an 18-year-old former football player, apparently wanted to parlay the 311 Boyz's exploits into profits.

Don Gallion, the father of two of the boys now facing criminal charges, told police that his sons, Clatterbuck and other friends were watching a tape of fight footage in his home months ago. He said he paid little attention to the footage until noticing that his sons were on the tape.

"I'm gonna sell that," Gallion said Clatterbuck told him. He said the teen cited the notorious "Bumfights" video, which captures street people engaged in fights, as an inspiration.

Clatterbuck was at the helm of the camera in July as several 311 Boyz watched two young black men batter each other on a residential street. When another boy came to the aid of one of the injured youths, Clatterbuck asked someone to hold his camera for him while he joined in a mass beating of the good Samaritan. Clatterbuck and others punched and kicked the boy, continuing to do so after the youth curled into a fetal position. Clatterbuck is on probation for his role in the attack.

DeFoor and Don Gallion seem to be largely representative of the other 311 Boyz's parents: They had some idea of what their children were up to but were far from forming a complete picture. Following Morgan's arrest, police told DeFoor that her son was a member of the 311 Boyz and asked whether she knew anything about the group.

"Is that like the Backstreet Boys?" DeFoor asked. She was floored when a detective explained that the 311 Boyz were a white supremacist gang and that her son had an Iron Cross tattoo on his back.

She told police what she knew, including that all her son's friends appeared to be affluent. "They all drove nice cars," DeFoor said. She phoned the parents of Morgan's friends to warn them that their sons might also be 311 Boyz members and in trouble.

None took her seriously. "They said, 'No, he can't be in a gang.' " DeFoor recalled.

In the following weeks, alleged 311 Boyz members would be charged in a rock attack that left a 17-year-old boy maimed and in other assaults, including those involving a red-hot butter knife pressed against a boy's ear and a crowbar that smashed a boy's face. DeFoor noted that some of those same parents she called now have children facing attempted murder charges.

"I tried to warn them," she said.

The party's over

The world of the 311 Boyz has been turned upside down in the past two months. The dozens of friends who spent countless hours hanging out, getting loaded and talking tirelessly on cell phones about everything and nothing, have stopped speaking to one another.

Police say the wave of violence appeared to halt in the days following the arrest of numerous members last month in connection with the most horrific assault, a July 18 rock attack that left Centennial High School student Stephen Tanner Hansen maimed. Nine young men now face charges of attempted murder in the incident. All but one of them are out of jail after posting $40,000 bail.

The violence of the 311 Boyz has been curtailed. "I think they realized that the heat was on, and that their antics had to stop," said Las Vegas police Capt. Dan Barry.

All the teens interviewed for this story said they are puzzled by the intense media coverage that has been devoted to the 311 Boyz. The teens spoke at length about their belief that the story has been blown out of proportion. They only make headlines and newscasts because they are white, middle- and upper-class youths rather than members of a racial minority from the inner city, they say.

"It gives you guys some juice when you get tired of writing about the black kids and the Hispanic kids shooting each other," said Steven Gazlay, who is charged in three of the attacks. "You guys just want to make this bigger than the O.J. Simpson trial."

The fallout from the 311 case has ended numerous friendships. Talk of possible plea deals for some of the defendants in exchange for incriminating testimony has fueled allegations of betrayal among teens who only two months ago were partying together. "It definitely broke up most of the group," Reid said. "All the guys got turned against each other."

Several of the 311 Boyz miss the lifestyle of constant partying that has all but vanished. "Things are not like they used to be," McLaughlin said. "If you found a party before, it was cool and anybody could come. You'd just call people up. But now it's restrictive. They say, 'If you know any 311 Boyz, you better not be at this party and you better not call any of them over here.' "

For others, the stigma of being linked to the 311 Boyz led several group members to drop out of Centennial. "I had to leave school because of this (expletive), because I'm being harassed," said Paterniti, a sophomore, who like numerous 311 members is now being home-schooled. "I don't have interest in going back to school. I don't want to hang out with those kids anymore."

Centennial sophomore Jessica Webb, Hansen's neighbor, accompanied him to the party where he was maimed. She has taken measures to ensure she cannot easily call any 311 Boyz members if tempted to re-establish friendships. "I just deleted my whole phone book in my cell phone," said Webb, who wasn't a member of the group. "After the party, I didn't want anything to do with them."

McLaughlin and Erickson expressed sorrow for Hansen's maiming.

But other 311 Boyz said they have spent more time worrying about their friends facing criminal charges. "Some of them have scholarships," Paterniti said. "They have dreams of doing things, and this whole thing took everything away. One little mistake took all that away."