Video of beatdown of local teen goes viral; girl, 17, arrested

WACO, Texas (KWTX) – A 17-year-old girl was in the McLennan County Jail Friday afternoon after video of a beating that sent another teenage girl to a local hospital went viral.

Madison Hubbard, 17, is charged with aggravated assault causing serious bodily injury, according to online jail records.

McLennan County investigators arrested her Friday morning.

She remained jailed Friday night in lieu of a $10,000 bond.

Video of the attack early Monday morning, which went viral on social media, shows a teenage girl kicking and hitting the 17-year-old victim repeatedly in front of an audience while she was passed out.

“Other people are in the background, laughing, watching, taunting,” said Candice Lovell, the victim’s mother. “No one, no one helped my daughter.”

Lovell says her daughter has openly admitted to drinking alcohol and taking an unprescribed bar of Xanax with her boyfriend Sunday night, and that’s the last thing she remembers.

“Supposedly they were her friends--they’re not her friends, they left her face down in a pool of blood,” said Lovell. “The kids that your kid thinks that they’re friends with are probably not, because those are the kids that left my daughter for dead.”

The Lacy Lakeview mother, who has custody of her daughter’s two-year-old child, says her daughter called her Monday saying she was badly hurt and didn’t know how it happened.

Later at the hospital, she says people were sending her messages about Snapchat videos of her daughter being attacked by a girl who was also dating her daughter’s boyfriend.

Lovell says she’s been reliving a nightmare ever since

“It’s horrible to see it, I watch them, they’re on my phone because I have to have them for police evidence, I want them deleted, I don’t want to watch them again, I don’t want to hear ’em because it’s my daughter,” said Lovell. “It’s humiliating, and more videos keep coming out.”

Emergency room doctors treated her daughter for a fractured rib, a concussion and severe facial injuries, which will require reconstructive surgery, she said.

Wanting to file charges, Lovell requested a Waco police officer come to the hospital.

She says they came and took a report and some forensic photographs, however, a detective wasn’t assigned to the case until Thursday morning, and during the days in between they’d been trying to hand over evidence and speak with an investigator but says they were told ’no.’

“It’s also my understanding that the girl who attacked my daughter went to Waco PD this week and tried to press charges against my family because she’d been receiving death threats as a result of her filmed attack,” said Lovell. “But she wasn’t even taken in for questioning.”

She says the frustration came to a head Thursday afternoon when the detective told them they’d be in training all day Friday and probably wouldn’t get to the case until next week.

“I know they’re busy and I fully support police,” said Lovell. “But my husband and I were really fed up that nothing was done, that nothing was done immediately, especially when the evidence was so clear, so we posted about it on social media.”

Lovell says people starting tagging various police agencies including the McLennan County Sheriff’s Office, so while the case was originally being handled by Waco PD, early Friday morning the family asked MCSO to take over the case.

The Waco Police Department violated no policies or procedures, according to the agency’s spokesman, Officer Garen Bynum, who says they do work more cases than other agencies in the area, and it takes time to do a proper investigation on things.

“An investigator was assigned to this case, as normal,” said Bynum. “She’s easily investigating a dozen cases at this time.”

He described the process.

“The way our cases work, (after taking a report) it gets dictated by the officer either during or at the end of the officer’s shift, and it usually takes a day or two to get typed and through the system, and then it goes to the appropriate investigative unit. This case was sent on Wednesday and was assigned Thursday morning to an investigator. She was in the process of doing her investigation and had interviewed, in-person, family members and the victim. We were actively working this case and were waiting on more evidence, specifically medical records. She was waiting for the medical records from the victim to know the appropriate charge on the suspect. We’re talking about a 24-hour window in which we were waiting on more physical evidence.”

Bynum says they were notified Friday morning that MCSO was working the case and had made an arrest.

“At no point in time were we ever contacted prior to them taking the case over,” he said. “They just contacted us afterwards.”

Sheriff Parnell McNamara said they had to act quickly.

“When our citizens reach out for help we’re not going to turn them down, we’re going to help them,” McNamara told KWTX Friday. “We saw how dangerous this was and how serious a case this was, and so we acted swiftly and will continue to do that.”

McNamara described the footage of the beating as “sickening.”

“I watched it several times today and I can’t get over it, the video absolutely makes you sick when you see it, it would make anybody sick,” said McNamara. “For somebody to do that, and then to video it and brag about it and put it out there on the internet, is sick beyond belief.”

He says, after his investigators saw the video, they felt time was of the essence.

“She was in fear of her life, and we were in fear of her life, we were afraid that something even worse was going to happen to this young lady,” said McNamara. “Paperwork can come later. when someone is in danger like this young lady was, we had no choice but to kick into gear and do this as fast as we can.”

The first thing they did was meet with the victim (who had been out of the area hiding for days) and her mother early Monday morning.

McNamara said, when the victim arrived to his office, her eyes were so badly injured she couldn’t physically write a statement, so they had to videotape her statement instead.

“She couldn’t see the paper she was beaten so bad,” said McNamara. “This was a horrible, vicious attack, these things are extremely serious, and we had to work quickly to protect the victim and others from potentially committing more violence in retaliation.”

Before 8 a.m. Friday, they’d tracked the attacker down and she was arrested, McNamara said.

“This girl was almost beat to death, there was nothing ordinary about this, I’m very proud of our guys, they worked all night long and made a good case,” said McNamara.

Lovell said she was on her way back from taking her granddaughter to daycare when she got the news and had to pull over.

“It was a huge relief to find out ‘hey, we got her’ within hours of getting the case,” said an emotional Lovell. “That was the first time that we felt like something’s going to get done, something’s going to get done for our daughter, it feels like we’re on the road to justice.”

McNamara promised more arrests and charges were on the way.

“We’re not going to tolerate this kind of behavior, and we’re going to do everything we can to make them pay,” said McNamara.

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