@dem_white_boyz
Age: 17, 17, 18
Vine followers: 4M
Years from now, when the Notable Twerks of 2013 are marked into the history books, July 14 will sit before Miley Cyrus’s August VMA performance as being one of the greats. Baylor Barnes, John Stephen Grice, and Cole LaBrant, three best friends from Troy, Alabama, took a break from video games to scroll through Vine. They came across a video from popular user Dalaun Richardson asking for submissions to a twerking contest. All the entries were from women. And so the boys came up with their own entry, a seconds-long, simplistically choreographed twerk routine filmed in front of a pool table. “We were kind of making fun of the girls, to be honest,” says Barnes. By the next morning, Barnes had 10,000 more followers. Their next efforts stretched beyond twerking—they’ve lip-synched to frat mainstay “Livin’ on a Prayer,” for instance—but the boys’ bread-and-butter routine remains dropping it to rap songs. Soon they had a name for their performance troupe: Dem White Boyz. Teenage girls (mostly white ones, it appears) are their biggest fans.
From left to right, Cole LaBrant, Baylor Barnes, and John Stephens Grice. Photo: Jason Nocito
Photo: Jason Nocito
Jamel Lewis (left) West 145th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Lewis, a 21-year-old security guard, was hit on November 30, 2006, by a private sanitation truck. Franco Scorcia West 40th Street and Broadway. On December 6, 2007, 72-year-old Scorcia was returning home from Central Park when he was hit by a charter bus making a right turn.