Social media is essentially a scourge on this earth. I know there are benefits for some people, but I think largely it has devolved our population’s empathy and intelligence. There is something about ingesting these bite-sized parasocial relationships that dehumanizes us ever so slightly. Many feel entitled to judge situations they don’t fully understand from a few-second clip, while others will blindly follow challenges that ultimately hurt them and the people around them. It has certainly “motivated” many impressionable young people to do a lot of stupid things and sometimes go so far as to completely ruin people’s lives.
Social media may be partially to blame for ‘inspiring’ five teens to commit the heinous act of assaulting and ultimately killing a homeless man.
According to People, adolescents aged from 13 to 15 viciously attacked an unhoused man, Peter Bennedum, 45, on April 27, 2026, in Binghamton, New York. The trend is pretty straightforward: Kids attack unhoused folks purely for sport and take video of it for all of social media to see. A news release from the Binghamton Police Department stated that the boys injured Bennedum so badly he needed to be hospitalized. By the time he arrived at the hospital, he was already brain-dead.
Four of the five unnamed teens were officially arrested and charged with attempted murder.
At 1:21 p.m. May 5, Bennedum’s family made the tough choice to remove him from life support, meaning he was officially killed by the group. The following day, authorities found and arrested the youngest member of the group. All are now in juvenile detention centers and charged with second-degree murder.
Patrick McCann, who grew up with Bennedum, wrote about him on Facebook, on May 2, claiming that after the assault, “He laid there for over two hours on the street before anyone helped him. His story has made national news now,” he added. “Don’t judge and be better humans. You don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes.”
Now, the community is in an uproar about the mistreatment of the most vulnerable members of their population.
In an emotional open letter written and shared on WNBF titled “Binghamton, This Is Not Who We Want To Be,” author Traci Taylor stated, “Children are accused of killing him. And every single part of that sentence seems impossible to process.” She went on to call for people to remember that Bennedum’s situation didn’t make him any less human.
“No matter what road brought Peter to that moment in life, he did not deserve to be beaten, and certainly so badly that he died,” she added in her letter.
