Drive-through brawl
At 2 a.m. on June 9, police received several 911 calls reporting a group of about 10 people fighting outside of a restaurant at Fifth Avenue North and Broad Street.
When officers arrived, they saw the group still fighting in the parking lot. Several people were seen fleeing the area as they arrived.
According to witnesses at the scene, a group of three people wearing sports jerseys were standing in line at the drive-through waiting to order. A car pulled in behind them, and they got into a verbal argument with the occupants of the vehicle. The altercation eventually turned physical.
The three victims mostly suffered cuts and bruises to the face, but one also had a severely swollen ankle. He was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment.
The victims corroborated the witnesses’ accounts of the incident, but police couldn’t get them to say what the argument started over or why it turned physical.
One of the victims said that one of the suspects had a knife during the fight. He reported hearing the suspect say, “Get off my friends, or I’m going to cut you.”
The suspect admitted that he pulled out the knife but said that he only did it for self-defense when the victim and his friends surrounded him.
One of the restaurant’s employees told police that he had just finished his shift and was walking to his vehicle when he saw the group in the drive-through.
He said the group in the car in the drive-through line yelled at the three men wearing jerseys. He added that the suspects in the car were the first to be physical. He also said there were more people in the fight who took off in a car when police arrived.
The witness also said the victim with the swollen ankle was on the receiving end of most of the suspects’ attacks, so that is probably why he was the most injured from the incident.
Although the suspect refused to cooperate with police by giving out his friends’ names, no arrests were made.
Some of the witnesses and victims also said one of the suspects may have had a Taser, but it was unclear. All of the involved people were highly intoxicated, according to the police report
Purse snatch
On June 5, around 11:30 p.m., a woman was walking to her car in the 200 block of Dravus Street when someone grabbed her purse strap. As she tried to flee and struggled to hold onto her purse, a male voice said, “Calm down, honey.”
The man then yanked her purse off her shoulder and ran toward Dravus.
The victim said three men ran away toward Dravus. She could not see their faces or give any kind of description.
She found her purse in the same block, and the only thing missing was some cash. She had recently cashed her paycheck.
She says she didn’t call 911 immediately because she wanted to just get out of the area. She went to the West Precinct the next day, and they told her to go to work and report it there.
Caught off-guard
A woman was violently pushed from behind on June 4, around 5 p.m., as she was crossing Broad Street, causing her to fall and bruise her knee and shoulder on the ground. A man then grabbed her purse and fled the area in an unknown direction.
The woman said that she would not be able to recognize him if she saw him again.
The victim didn’t call police at the time of the incident because she speaks limited English and wasn’t sure of what to do.[[In-content Ad]]
