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Joey Messina is soft-spoken.
A first honors student at Mastery Charter Thomas Campus, the 12-year-old loves baseball, but Joey can’t shake the troublemakers at school.
“They don’t like me, they never did,” he says.
Overnight, this seventh-grader’s schoolyard differences followed him home, spray-painted for all to see on his South Philadelphia home where he lives with his parents and two younger siblings.
The threatening racially-charged words cut deep.
“I turned around and just went, ‘Oh my God.’ I called him and said, ‘Hurry up, get out here and look at this,’” Margaux Messina, Joey’s mom, said.
“He walked outside and saw that, he came right in, said, ‘Dad, I am scared now,’” said Joey’s dad, Joe Messina.
Joey’s mom and dad say their son was targeted because of his race. The family is white.