Hate-crime suspect's dad: 'Let him learn his lesson'

Fed up with his son's arrests, the father of a teen charged in an anti-gay beating aboard a school bus said he's going to let him stew in jail.

"Let him learn his lesson," Shane Morrison, father of 16-year-old suspect Chase Morrison, said after a judge on Friday ordered the teen jailed on $110,000 bond or $55,000 cash bail. "I think he deserves what he gets."

The teen and two of his friends, who are charged with third-degree assault as a hate crime, a felony, are accused of slapping and kicking a 14-year-old Tuesday afternoon while yelling anti-gay slurs aboard the bus as the vehicle left the Nassau BOCES Career Preparatory High School in Westbury.

On Wednesday morning, that same teen was slapped on the head by Morrison and David Spencer of Valley Stream, police said, and again endured taunts about sexual orientation during the bus ride.

Bonnie Bastian, a spokeswoman for First Student, the Cincinnati-headquarterd bus company that contracts with BOCES, said the driver and the aide aboard the bus were placed on administrative leave pending an internal investigation; she said the company's action is standard during such investigations and does not necessarily indicate fault.

The elder Morrison said he'd repeatedly warned his son - who the judge said is already on probation for a previous, undisclosed incident - to stay away from the "bad company" he's been keeping lately.

"He's not homophobic, he's nothing like that," the 48-year-old father said. "He's just being stupid."

Chase Morrison lives with his mother in Lakeview. Shane Morrison lives in Brooklyn.

The father came to First District Court in Hempstead to see his son be arraigned on charges that also include a separate robbery accusation concerning an incident later Tuesday in which police say a restaurant employee was mugged at knifepoint.

"As a parent, your hands are tied," he said. "I feel like slapping him over the head."

Also arrested in the two bus incidents were Spencer, 18, and Roy Wilson, 16, of Baldwin. Both were arraigned Thursday - Spencer on $2,000 bond or $1,000 cash and Wilson on $1,000 bond or $500 cash, according to the district attorney's office. A 14-year-old also has been charged, police said Friday. That teen's name and charges were not made public.

In a two-page admission to police in court records, Morrison describes how he and others on the bus hurled curses and anti-gay invective at the unnamed victim for being late for the afternoon bus.

"I know [the victim] to be gay, and everyone on the bus knows it," the admission says, describing how the victim was slapped and kicked and fell to the floor - and how the boy tried to ignore the taunts.

"During this entire incident," Morrison's admission says, "the aide on the bus did nothing to stop any of us from kicking and slapping" the victim.

The bus company spokeswoman said its investigation would determine whether the driver and the aide followed company policy to pull over during a disturbance and summon the authorities; she said staff are instructed not to get involved in order to keep themselves and other students safe.