Witnesses describe mobs, some people claim racially-charged attacks
By Jay Sorgi and the WTMJ News Team
WEST ALLIS - Witnesses tell Newsradio 620 WTMJ and TODAY'S TMJ4 of a mob of young people attacking innocent fair-goers at the end of the opening night of State Fair, with some callers claiming a racially-charged scene.
Milwaukee Police confirmed there were assaults outside the fair.
Witnesses' accounts claim everything from dozens to hundreds of young black people beating white people as they left State Fair Thursday night.
Authorities have not given official estimates of the number of people involved in the attacks.
"It looked like they were just going after white guys, white people," said Norb Roffers of Wind Lake in an interview with Newsradio 620 WTMJ. He left the State Fair Entrance near the corner of South 84th Street and West Schlinger Avenue in West Allis.
"They were attacking everybody for no reason whatsoever."
"It was 100% racial," claimed Eric, an Iraq war veteran from St. Francis who says young people beat on his car.
"I had a black couple on my right side, and these black kids were running in between all the cars, and they were pounding on my doors and trying to open up doors on my car, and they didn't do one thing to this black couple that was in this car next to us. They just kept walking right past their car. They were looking in everybody's windshield as they were running by, seeing who was white and who was black. Guarantee it."
Eric, a war veteran, said that the scene he saw Thursday outside State Fair compares to what he saw in combat.
"That rated right up there with it. When I saw the amount of kids coming down the road, all I kept thinking was, 'There's not enough cops to handle this.' There's no way. It would have taken the National Guard to control the number of kids that were coming off the road. They were knocking people off their motorcycles."
Another witness, who asked to remain anonymous, said, "it was like a scene you needed the National Guard to control."
"To me, it looked like a scene out of a movie," claimed the anonymous witness.
"I have not seen anything like this in my life. It was a huge mob, and it was a fight that maybe lasted one to two minutes."
Roffers claimed that as he left the state fair with his wife, crowds near that entrance were large, and someone in that crowd .
"As we got closer to the street, we looked up the road, and we saw a quite a bit of commotion going on and there was a guy laying in the road, and nobody was even laying there. He wasn't even moving. Finally a car pulled up. They stopped right next to the guy, and it looked like someone was going to help him. We were kind of stuck, because we couldn't cross. Traffic was going through. Young black men running around, beating on people, and we were like 'Let's get the heck out of here.' The light turned, and I got attacked from behind. I just got hit in the back of the head real hard. I'm like, 'What the heck is going on here?' I heard my bell ring."
Roffers further described what witnesses said happened to the man who was lying in the street.
"People were saying he was on a bike. They tore him off his bike and beat on him. We were walking to the west on Schlinger. I was watching behind me a lot more diligently, making sure there wasn't anybody coming to get us anymore."
One person claimed that someone was knocked off a motorcycle.
TODAY'S TMJ4 video shows West Allis police handcuffing at least one person, but they won't say how many people they took into custody.
Some witnesses described attacks on the State Fair Grounds as well.
Milwaukee Police said that their officers were sent to State Fair Park for "complaints of battery, fighting and property damage due to a large, unruly crowd."
A police sergeant told TODAY'S TMJ4's Melissa McCrady that the number of calls describing injuries are still coming in, so they could not give an accurate number of people who were injured.
That sergeant explained that some injuries were serious, and local hospitals were attending to the injured.
As of early Friday morning, Milwaukee Police said they had no one in custody.
One woman told police that she was sitting in her car with a window down when some teenagers reached through her window and started attacking her.
"I think once we get all the info in it'll be just like that, like what happened in Riverwest," said the police sergeant.
West Allis Police ask you to call them at 414-302-8000 if you have any information.
Article continues at link with interviews and a video of the police activity afterward:
http://www.todaystmj4.com/news/local/126825018.html
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| Where do I fit in a race war? |
Poor education standards, lack of meaningful opportunity, economic devastation, these are not just black problems. Point of fact, more white people in America live in poverty than blacks. That is not to say of course that there aren't issues that are more unique or generally oriented to one racial group or another, but events like this certainly do nothing to bridge the gap and come together in a way that will bring meaningful change. When all is said and done, these kids might as well have gone out and beat up other black people for the black-eye this event will leave on the black community.
