Teen Watches Helplessly As Her Boyfriend Is Beat Up On FaceTime
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DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) – A Dallas teen talking to her boyfriend on FaceTime finds herself suddenly watching a violent armed robbery.
It was bad enough for 17-year-old Baylee Lucciani seeing her boyfriend beaten on her phone's screen, but the moment the suspects looked straight into the camera and saw her and her father watching them is something she'll never forget.
When 19-year-old Yale Gerstein walked away from his computer to answer the door of his Austin apartment, it was an abrupt end to Baylee Lucciani's FaceTime chat with him. The next thing she knew, three men broke into his apartment and started pistol-whipping him.
"I was like, oh my gosh, I'm watching this all on my phone, so I'm just like screenshot, screenshot, screenshot," she said.
Baylee called for her father in another room of their Dallas home. He wondered if it was some sort of prank until he saw the gun, called 911, and started shooting photos of Baylee's screen with his own phone.
"We were watching him get beat up, and we couldn't do anything about it. We were just watching it," Chris Lucciani said.
Apparently the robbers hadn't noticed the FaceTime chat still going. At first Baylee wasn't sure if she should keep quiet, but then decided to yell out to the suspects that she was calling the police.
"It was pretty weird. They looked right at us," Chris Lucciani said.
"And I'm just like, AHHH! And they were like, should we just kill him?" Baylee said.
After that her phone's screen went black.
"The camera had already been knocked off, and we were under the impression that he had been shot, so that was the scariest part about it," Chris Lucciani said.
A few minutes later he received a call from Austin Police letting them know Yale was okay. Now Baylee wonders if letting the suspects know they were being watched may have saved her boyfriend's life.
Baylee and her dad were able to forward all their photos of the suspects to Austin police who tell us this remains an ongoing investigation.
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