Posted on August 5, 2011

Witnesses Describe Mobs, Some People Claim Racially-Charged Attacks

Jay Sorgi, WTMJ (Milwaukee), August 5, 2011

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.

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Witnesses’ accounts claim everything from dozens to hundreds of young black people beating white people as they left State Fair Thursday night.

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“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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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Eric, who asked Newsradio 620 WTMJ not to use his last name, talked about the incidents that happened as he, his wife and a neighbor left the fair Thursday.

“We exited at the Schlinger and 84th exit, and we walked south about a block, and then went up and got our car, came back up and around down Schlinger. When we made a left hand turn, we were stopped in traffic. I looked toward the bridge, right before you get on the freeway, and all I saw was a road full of black kids, jumping over people’s cars, jumping on people’s hoods, running over the top of them.”

Eric then claimed that he saw hundreds of young black people coming down a sidewalk.

“I saw them grab this white kid who was probably 14 or 15 years old. They just flung him into the road. They just jumped on him and started beating him. They were kicking him. He was on the ground. A girl picked up a construction sign and pushed it over on top of him. They were just running by and kicking him in the face.”

Then, Eric talked about trying to get out of the car to help the victim.

“My wife pulled me back in because she didn’t want me to get hit. Thankfully, there was surprisingly a lady that was in the car in front of me that jumped out of the car real quick and went over there to try to put her body around the kid so they couldn’t see he was laying there and, obviously, defenseless. Her husband, or whoever was in the car, was screaming at her to get back into the car. She ended up going back into the car. These black kids grabbed this kid off the ground again, and pulled him up over the curb, onto the sidewalk and threw him into the bushes like he was a piece of garbage.”

Eric claimed that the victim in that beating was by himself, and that there was a split of white people on one sidewalk and black people on the other.

“There was nobody else around to help him. There were no other white people, period, on that side of the street. They were going in the opposite direction because, those people who were coming out of the fair that saw these people coming, they either went back into the fair or took off running south on 84th Street.”

Eric expressed anger at the State Fair Police for what he considered a lack of response.

“The thing that irritated me, the State Fair Police, the State Police, were down by the Pettit entrance to get in there,” said Eric. “There was probably 5 or 6 officers down there. That’s where all these kids came from. They came out of the Midway, across the front of the Pettit. They were still filing out of there. The State Fair Police, they knew this was going on. They knew these kids were beating these guys in between that exit and Schlinger at the next gate.”

“They were stopping traffic, and I said ‘What in the hell,’ excuse my language, ‘what are you guys doing directing traffic when there are 300, 400 black kids up the road beating the hell out of everybody, pushing people off of motorcycles?’ I was livid. I could not believe they were directing traffic.”

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A witness told WTMJ that as he worked in a kiosk at the State Fair Midway, he saw what he described as “a Riverwest type mob. Easily between 50–100 kids all under 18 and all African American. They were running around knocking people over (young kids and adults), looting the Midway games (stealing the prizes), starting fights.”

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“It was just complete chaos. There were police on horses, lots of security guards, and EMT’s on the scene. They never got control of the area.”

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She [a witness] described what she saw as she left the fair.

“As we came through the exit we saw a white boy lying in the street, in the fetal position right by the traffic light, and coming towards us was tons and tons and black teens–there had to have been over a hundred–in the middle of 84th Street and on the sidewalk headed south,” she said.

“Some who stopped to kick or punch him–or in the case of one girl drop kick him in the head–as they walked past. My friends and I started towards him to help him up and a black girl walked past telling us ‘ya’ll gonna get your ***** kicked’ repeatedly. As my friend stood in front of the boy trying to get him up one of the teens picked up a traffic cone, hit her in the back of the head and ran off. A car stopped, a white woman got out to try and help. Teens jumped onto the hood of the car and ran over it. She just kept saying ‘What is wrong with you!?'”

The witness also told us that not every African-American teenager outside the fair grounds acted violent.

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Roffers described his emotions and reactions to the attacks outside the park.

“I turned around and looked, there was this black kid standing there laughing, thinking it’s funny. My wife’s like, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ It’s one of those things, you don’t expect it. Your reaction to it is, first of all, quite surprised, then you get so angry, it’s like, ‘What in the hell’s going on there? Why are these guys acting like such hoodlums? What are they picking on anybody for?’ We were just like cattle being herded out of the park, and they were picking and choosing who they wanted to beat on.”

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State Fair Director of Marketing and Communication Kathleen O’Leary told Newsradio 620 WTMJ’s “Wisconsin’s Morning News” that the incidents should not stop people from coming to the fair.

“Certainly, don’t change your plans,” said O’Leary. “Please understand that this is an unfortunate situation, hopefully an isolated situation.”

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Don Walker and Mike Johnson, Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee), August 5, 2011

Gov. Scott Walker has ordered the Wisconsin State Patrol to provide additional law enforcement help at the Wisconsin State Fair after several incidents involving rampaging youths broke out on the fairgrounds and on the streets outside Thursday night.

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Also, Rick Frenette, CEO of the fair, announced that, because of the violence overnight, the fair would immediately implement a policy in which no youths under 18 years of age would be allowed onto the grounds after 5 p.m. without a parent or guardian who is at least 21 years of age. There will be no changes at the Midway.

Frenette, a veteran of 40 years in the fair management business, said he had never implemented such a policy before. The International Association of Fairs and Expositions said there is only one other fair in the country–the South Carolina State Fair–that has such a policy.

On Friday, police from three jurisdictions–West Allis, Milwaukee and Wisconsin State Fair–were spending Friday piecing together a series of incidents late Thursday night at the fair in which large groups of youths rampaged through the midway and outside the grounds after closing. At least 24 were arrested, and seven officers were hurt, a State Fair official said.

Tom Struebing, chief of the State Fair Police, said two of the seven injured officers were hospitalized. One was hit in the face with an improvised weapon; the other suffered a concussion.

Struebing said the fights that broke out in the midway area involved black youths fighting other black youths. He said those fights were not racially motivated.

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Officials could not say what started what witnesses said was a series of racially charged incidents that apparently began as early as 7 p.m. in the midway. {snip}

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Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn scheduled a news conference later Friday afternoon to discuss the incidents and his department’s involvement. He is expected to be joined by officials of the NAACP and the Historic Third Ward Association, which is sponsoring Saturday’s Historic Third Ward Jazz Festival.

Common Council President Willie Hines said he was at the fair Thursday night and witnessed black on black crime, but did not see any blacks attack whites.

He said that if there was, those individuals should be charged with the crime as well as a hate crime.

“They should be penalized for the prime incident and we should have a racial enhancer,” Hines said.

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Witnesses told WTMJ-AM (620) that dozens to hundreds of young black people were beating white people as they left the fair late Thursday night. {snip}

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One eyewitness, a concession worker who works near the midway area, told the Journal Sentinel that large groups of African-American youths ran through the midway area, knocking over young children and adults, disrupting midway rides and tearing signs up.

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A 34-year-old Muskego man said he was riding on the Ferris wheel in the midway with one of his children when he heard shouts of “fight.”

“The trouble really started somewhere between 7 and 8 p.m.,” said the man, who did not want to be identified because he was worried about the safety of his family. “We just heard this roar start. It was almost like you’re at a football game and a touchdown is scored and you just hear the crowd start roaring.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. There were hundreds–like 200 to 300 would be my guess. It wasn’t like 10 or 20. There was definitely a fight going on in the middle. There were so many people you couldn’t see who was fighting. There was just this big group that kept growing and chanting, ‘fight, fight, fight.’ ”

“That lasted for one to two minutes. Then when security showed up blowing some whistles, all of this mob started running. It was like a herd of cattle,” he said.

The man described the crowd gathered around the fight as African-American, predominantly male and mainly 15- to 20-year-olds.

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Another eyewitness, a Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin worker who was with his wife, a daughter, a friend of his daughter’s, a brother and a sister-in-law, said they arrived at the midway at 9:15 p.m.

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He said a game-booth operator allowed his group to seek shelter in the booth while fights broke out.

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The eyewitness said he was the recipient of several racially charged comments from the black youths. At one point, he said, he approached a security guard and told him he had better get more security to the scene. He said he told the security officer that “trouble was brewing.”

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Another woman said she and her boyfriend were leaving the fair on a motorcycle about 11:30 p.m. Thursday when she saw a “mob of black teens picking on a very tall white teen” around S. 84th St. and W. Greenfield Ave.

“I stated to my boyfriend that there is going to be problems over there and I hope the cops are watching this and within seconds I saw the white teen attempting to punch his way out of a circle of black teens,” the woman said in an e-mail to the newspaper. “My heart just fell for him. As we turned, I saw security at the entrance to the State Fair and I yelled get over there! They are beating up a kid! We turned, as we went toward the expressway we then had to witness the police involved in multiple stops and incidents down 84th.”

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The fair incidents are similar to mob-like disturbances that occurred over the Fourth of July weekend in Milwaukee.

About 60 young people beat and robbed a smaller group that had been watching fireworks from Kilbourn Reservoir Park. The injured people were white; the attackers were African-American, witnesses said.

Another group looted a convenience store at a gas station at the corner E. North Ave. and N. Humboldt Blvd.

The incidents Thursday night come as the State Fair board over the last decade has worked to increase diversity at the annual fair, expanding its entertainment lineup and marketing to appeal to a younger, more multicultural audience. Diversity was a priority for State Fair Park Chairman Martin Greenberg, who spoke often of making it “truly the people’s park”–a “place of inclusion, not exclusion.”

Thursday night’s Main Stage performer was rapper MC Hammer, but a number of people who attended the concert said the show wasn’t to blame at all for the disturbances at the fair. {snip}

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