Pasadena’s Dr. Drew Felt Badly for Both the Victim and the Torturers in Facebook Live Incident

Pasadena-based celebrity doctor Dr. Drew said he “felt bad” for four young Chicago adults who are now in custody for allegedly kidnapping and torturing a disabled man and streaming the incident on Facebook live.

The story of the four — two young men and two young women — is now sweeping news and social media from the time they streamed the video.

In a video on TMZ, Dr. Drew, whose full name is Dr. Drew Pinsky, said he felt terrible for the victim, and that nothing excuses what the suspects did.

“I had a very strange reaction where I felt bad for the kids perpetrating it – I really felt horrible for them,” Pinsky said.

He went on to say that parents have to be more “on top” of kids and should set firmer limits without being aggressive with them.

“What’s going wrong in those kids’ lives that they could think not only that that’s funny, but that everybody else would think it was funny and that it would be OK to stream it,” he said on the TMZ video. “Their lives are going to be over. We’ve failed them.”

Pinsky was reacting to the Facebook live video that showed four teeners torture a disabled man after kidnapping him in a McDonald’s in Chicago. The video showed the victim as he was being beaten, cut with a knife, and burned on the skin with cigarettes. At one point, the video showed the suspects cutting a portion of the victim’s scalp.

News reports also said the suspects forced the disabled man to drink water from a toilet bowl and to kiss the floor, according to police statements.

Four suspects – Jordan Hill, 18; Tesfaye Cooper, 18; Brittany Covington, 18; and her sister Tanisha Covington, 24 – have been charged with two hate crimes and other charges.

Pinsky grew up in Pasadena and attended Polytechnic School. He majored in biology at Amherst College and earned his M.D. at the University of Southern California School of Medicine.

He hosted the nationally syndicated radio talk show Loveline since the show’s inception in 1984 until its end in 2016. On television, he hosts the talk show Dr. Drew On Call on HLN, and hosted the now-canceled Lifechangers on The CW.

Pinsky is also Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, former Medical Director for the Department of Chemical Dependency Services at Las Encinas Hospital in Pasadena, California, staff member at Huntington Memorial Hospital, and a private practitioner.