I have a very good feeling that I know exactly what happened here. This incident took place yesterday right down the street from where I live in front of a UPS Store I used to go to nearly every day.
The attack was caught on a cellphone and started with a man yelling at a woman trying to back up in her truck. The man’s white minivan is parked in a fire lane. When I saw this, that’s when I had a feeling of what this was all about.
Many people park in the fire lane and go into the UPS Store because this parking lot is usually pretty full. There are a few restaurants and other shops around. But all this does is make it harder for the people that parked correctly to back out of the parking spots.
So I assume the altercation started with an argument between the woman trying to back her truck out and the man who parked in the fire lane. As you can see in the video, he is telling her to leave and then starts cursing at the other bystanders, telling them, “You’re not going to do a god damn thing. I’ll crush all of you.”
After that, you hear another man telling him to calm down. It seems that now that it is a man confronting him, he feels like he can get in his face. He says, “Cool, I can get violent with you because you’re a guy.”
These two get into an argument, and the old man follows the other man telling him, “Come on, do it again.” That’s when you hear the hit and see the older man hit the ground. It was reported that he didn’t get up for roughly 20 minutes. The victim was taken to the hospital, and the suspect was arrested Monday night after checking himself into a VA hospital, as reported by WWLT. He faces charges of second-degree battery, simple assault, and disturbing the peace and his bond has been set at $1,000,000.
While it may be admirable that the older man stood up for the women that were being yelled at and harassed, I’d say the only thing it did was escalate the situation. Some people in the video comments said that he could call it self-defense since the other man followed him. I’m not a lawyer, but from what I can see, there’s a huge disparity of force between the two, and the suspect could have kept walking and got into his van and left.
But the victim also shouldn’t have followed after the suspect. The man was clearly angry and out of control. Telling someone like this to calm down will most often produce the opposite results.
This is also a good time to mention that you should be carrying some type of non-lethal weapon such as pepper spray. It is too cheap not to have and the one I recommend is POM Pepper Spray.
