Alexa Moffatt was sitting on her front porch Sunday night, waiting for her son to come home.

Just two blocks away, a group of her son’s ninth-grade classmates shoved him to the ground and held a gun up to his head to steal his $100 cell phone, she said.

The next day, two boys beat, cut and bruised a 16-year-old girl who got on the bad side of another group when she refused to have sex with one of them a few weeks before, the girl said.

One high school freshman in the neighborhood started carrying a meat cleaver in his back pocket to protect himself after he was beaten and robbed while walking to work. Moffatt said she took the weapon away from him but didn’t know what to tell him about defending himself.

Sonjanique Ferrell won’t allow her 14-year-old son to walk anywhere, ride his bike when she’s not home or be with anyone she doesn’t know, fearing violence in the streets.

Although police say they haven’t noticed a trend, some parents are complaining that teenage gangsters are robbing, attacking and threatening their classmates.

Some parents, who said they are terrified by stories of teen thugs roaming Galveston’s streets with guns, say police need to do a better job of protecting their children.

“This time they held a gun to his head,” Moffatt said. “What is happening? They’re able to do this again and again. (My son) is scared to death to walk down the street. It makes me terrified.”

‘Not acceptable’

In the last month, Moffatt said she’s heard story after story about teen thugs robbing and beating up their classmates in Galveston’s streets.

She said she knows four other teens who’ve been robbed by a group of teens near 35^th Street and Seawall Boulevard in the last month.

“The parents are outraged, but they will tell me, ‘It’s just Galveston,’ ” she said. “That is not acceptable. It shouldn’t be acceptable.”

Moffatt said that, after she reported her son’s robbery to police and he used an old yearbook to point out his attackers, the same teens started riding their bikes past the boy’s house, holding guns behind their backs.

They used her son’s stolen cell phone to call his friends, threatening to kill him even though Moffatt said her son was only a casual acquaintance of the boys when they were in school together.

Terrified, she put her son on a plane to Dallas.

“He’s not going to be able to attend Ball High, at least not in ninth grade,” she said. “The (teens who attacked) claim gang affiliations. They’re dangerous. They’re not caught.”

‘Not every day’

The area where many of the robberies and assaults happened is a high-crime area, police Lt. D.J. Alvarez said.

But he said police haven’t noticed a trend.

“This isn’t something that happens all the time,” he said. “It’s not something like a theft that we have every day.”

Alvarez said it can be difficult to find out which teens committed the crime and get enough evidence to arrest them.

“It’s a hit and miss whether they’re going to find out who did it or not,” he said.

If teens are charged, they’re taken to the juvenile justice center in Texas City, but Alvarez said space at that center can be a problem.

“We don’t have the facilities to house everyone,” he said.

Brent Norris, the juvenile justice department director, said the center can become overcrowded at times, but teens arrested for felonies such as aggravated robbery would be kept until their trial.

Alvarez said police would stepp up patrols in the area after hearing about the claims of increased juvenile violence.

Hiding inside

But Ferrell, whose son will be a sophomore at Ball High in August, said the problem of teen-on-teen violence isn’t new. It started when her son was in seventh grade, she said.

It’s now to the point that she doesn’t allow her son to walk to the store, ride his bike anywhere during the day or go somewhere without her knowing.

“The thing is, you live on Galveston Island, and every other block is a drug corner,” she said. “Who’s to say the mugger won’t walk this way?”

Alvarez said if people perceive crime spikes, they should contact police.

“I don’t see a growing trend, but people are more than welcome to contact us,” he said. “Someone shouldn’t have to live in fear.”