Grande Prairie RCMP are investigating after a 12-year-old boy was assaulted in an attack connected to a so-called "knockout game."
Cathy Rode said her grandson, Thomas Steidel, was attacked by a group of five teenagers near Hillside Community School Saturday, leaving him with a broken jaw.
Rode told CBC Edmonton the attack was part of the troubling "knockout" or "knock-down" game — where a stranger is punched in the head, in an attempt to render them unconscious.
“It’s going around the schools here like crazy,” Rode told the Edmonton Journal. “It’s even affecting the girls. It’s essentially for bragging rights.”
What's worse, says Rode, is that her grandson waited five days for surgery to repair his broken jaw.
CTV News reports Thomas was put on an urgent surgery list, but Alberta Health Services said a higher-than-average number of pressing procedures got in the way of his treatment.
"We don’t want to ever see our kids waiting for surgery,” zone medical director Kevin Worry told the Journal. “In this case, where he had been at the hospital for a couple of days, that is challenging to see him go through that. This was an atypical case.”
According to CTV, Thomas received his surgery Wednesday.
No arrests have been made at this point.
Several reports of the knockout game have surfaced in the U.S. in past months, but law enforcement says, despite the name, these attacks are still classified as assault.
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