Claire Galofaro, The Courier-Journal; 11:59 a.m. EDT March 28, 2014
(Photo: photos FROM SURVEILLANCE VIDEOs)
Story Highlights
"They were organized and nobody else was," Jean Henry said of the mob that attacked her husband.
Police Chief Steve Conrad has spent the days since defending LMPD's response to the violence
60 teens stormed Bader's Foot Mart on South First Street, about a mile from Waterfront Park
Chief Steve Conrad pleaded with teenagers not to avenge Offutt's death with more random violence
A swarm of two dozen teenagers walked up to a man on the Big Four Bridge around 7 p.m. Saturday and asked him for a cigarette. Then, without provocation, they pummeled him.
Within minutes, 10 teenagers on the bridge shoved another man to the ground, beat and kicked him, as his wife and granddaughters watched and wept.
The simultaneous attacks in broad daylight early Saturday evening were the opening salvo in a rampage that spanned at least three hours and two dozen blocks, and has, in the days since, sent city officials scrambling to reassure the public that downtown Louisville has not devolved into a lawless battlefield.
A Courier-Journal review of dozens of incident reports obtained from Louisville Metro Police chronicle the teens' movements. Mobs of teenagers roved the streets, several dozen people deep. They beat a man unconscious, broke windows, threw rocks at moving cars, looted a store, threatened a police officer and mugged anyone who dared get in their way. More than 30 people called to report trouble. Police have counted at least 20 crimes, and suspect there are more that have yet to be reported.
"They were organized and nobody else was," Jean Henry said of the mob that knocked her 61-year-old husband to the ground on the Big Four Bridge, then beat and kicked him. "When I was running to my husband, I looked around. I couldn't tell who was in the group and who just happened to be up there. People were in shock, I think that's why nobody helped us."
Police Chief Steve Conrad has spent the days since defending his department's response to the outbreak of violence, and explaining how a mass of kids managed to elude police for hours and continue robbing, beating and vandalizing.
The Louisville Metro Police Department, it turns out, had been prepared for a different sort of trouble — in a different place.
TARC stabbing
A week earlier, on March 16, a 44-year-old man stabbed a 14-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl on a TARC bus, according to police.
The boy, Ma'Quale Offutt, died of his injuries two days later. That same day, a horde of teenagers attempted to storm one bus at 34th and Broadway, and threw rocks at another bus four blocks west,a TARC spokeswoman said.
At the same time, large groups of teens had been reported congregating outside the McDonald's on West Broadway downtown, a nearby Kroger and at Shorty's Food Mart at West Broadway and 35th Street, said Deputy Chief Col. Yvette Gentry, who supervises the department's patrol units.
Police aren't sure whether the mischief was inspired by Offutt's death.
But, fearing more trouble the following Saturday — March 22 — the Louisville Metro Police Department stationed their VIPER and K9 units along Broadway on the fringe of downtown, Gentry said. Their patrol staff was larger than usual: 21 officers were working the First Division, which covers downtown, and 18 were assigned in the Second Division, which begins at the south side of Broadway. In all, 49 police officers were stationed along the Broadway corridor, the main route where they feared disorder.
Gentry acknowledges they were not expecting the explosion of violence at the waterfront.
Series of attacks
Police pieced together after the rampage that a group of around 200 teens had gathered at Waterfront Park in the late afternoon that Saturday for a memorial for Offutt, according to police. The memorial, they believe, began peacefully.
But at 7 p.m. — and for reasons that no one has yet offered — groups attacked Henry's husband and the other man on the bridge, both strangers to them.
Police soon responded but did not take a report, something Police Chief Steve Conrad has acknowledged was a mistake. Henry took himself to the hospital.
The violence quickly spiraled. According to the police reports:
At 7:23, just minutes after the two attacks on the bridge, police received a call of trouble nearby. A group of teenagers apparently decided they wanted a 13-year-old girl's sneakers. They punched and kicked her as they robbed the child of her iPhone and her purse. A 30-year-old stranger tried to come to her aid. The mob turned on him; someone stole his wallet, while another took his cell phone.
The man was taken to the hospital with cuts to his face and the back of his head.
An officer responded to that attack, and a witness pointed to a man they saw pull a gun from a trash can. Officers wrote that 18-year-old Je'Rece M. Archie was "making furtive movements to his pants." They stopped him at gunpoint and ordered him to show his hands. He allegedly pulled a loaded revolver from his pocket; police ordered him to drop it, and he complied. Archie and a 17-year-old friend were arrested on illegal weapons charges — the first and only arrests of the hours-long ordeal.
Some groups of kids fanned out to other parts of downtown. Others stayed behind and wreaked more havoc at the park.
Police responded to each incident, but never caught them in the act. Officers encountered groups of kids in the streets, but witnessed them commit no crimes and had no grounds to arrest them, said LMPD spokesman Dwight Mitchell.
Instead, they ordered them to disperse. But the groups just splintered, reorganized and stormed the streets some more.
Sometime between 7:30 and 8 p.m., a group jumped up and down on a car parked in a Courier-Journal parking lot on West Broadway, according to incident reports.
Between 8 and 8:30 p.m., back at Waterfront Park, a group of teens punched a 15-year-old in the face and stole his cell phone and wallet.
A police officer there attempted to stop a teenager, who "pulled away from the officer and postured himself in an aggressive manner and balled his fists," one incident report states. The officer ticketed the boy for menacing. He was released to his parents, Mitchell said.
A few minutes later, around 8:45, about 60 teens stormed Bader's Foot Mart on South First Street, about a mile from Waterfront Park. Employees tried to block the door, said Najisha McCubbins, a clerk whose husband also was working the store.
The group piled up outside. Employees could see them organizing: they said "ready, set, 1, 2, 3" and charged.
They pushed inside and beat McCubbins' husband him on the head, according to the police report. Surveillance footage shows the teenagers grabbing candy and chips as they fled.
The group moved down Liberty Street, where a 25-year-old woman was stopped at a stoplight around 8:55 p.m., according to the report. "Out of nowhere," she told police, a group of between 30 and 40 teenage boys surrounded her car and banged on it. They threw trash cans and rocks at her. One reached through her open window and punched her in the face.
She ran bleeding into Bader's, and was later taken to the hospital for stitches in her left cheek.
Minutes later and two blocks away at South Second and West Liberty streets, a 53-year-old man sitting in his truck watched as a horde of teens circled him, cursing and banging on the side of his pickup. He got out and told them to leave him alone. They punched him in the face and stole the cell phone from his shirt pocket. Then they climbed onto the hood of his truck and kicked in the windshield.
Then just after 9 p.m., back near The Courier-Journal,surveillance cameras pointed at the newspaper parking lot captured a mob of people, at least 30, parading down Fifth Street toward Broadway and across the newspaper's visitors' lot. Some marched along the tops of cars, others jumped on them like trampolines, one did a flip onto the roof of a sedan.
Around the same time at Sixth and Broadway,the mob attacked a 37-year-old man riding a yellow bicycle along Sixth. They knocked him off the bike, then punched and kicked him in the head. The group fled with the man's bike, leaving him bleeding on the sidewalk from a cut to the head.
Around 9:15 p.m., a 29-year-old man told police he was driving along Fifth Street, near The Courier-Journal building, when 40 to 50 males swarmed his car. They punched the car and threw rocks and trash cans at him.
Police believe that same group beat a 58-year-old man unconscious — officers found him at South Fifth Street and West Broadway, around 9:40 p.m. with obvious broken bones and a missing wallet. He was taken to the hospital. Police could not provide an update on his condition Thursday.
As suddenly as it started, the violence petered out: the next report came two hours later and more than 10 blocks away. A woman called from South 15th Street to say several teenagers pushed her, hit her in the head, grabbed her cell phone and fled.
That night and the following morning, people returned to their cars and their offices to survey the damage the mob left in its wake. Employees at a West Broadway business discovered the front window missing. People called police from all over downtown to say that their cars had been defaced: they reported shattered windshields, dented roofs and cars covered in dirty shoe prints.
The mob's wake
Days later, as officials hurried to prove to frightened and angry citizens that they can keep the city safe, prosecutors announced that the man who stabbed Offutt would not be charged with his murder. A grand jury watched the surveillance video from the bus and determined that Anthony Rene Allen jabbed his knife at the teenagers in self defense. The teens attacked him; he tried to retreat, he even asked the bus driver to open the door and let him free.
Conrad, with activist Christopher 2X, pleaded with teenagers not to avenge Offutt's death with more random violence, and begged parents to keep tabs on their kids.
Reporter Claire Galofaro can be reached at (502) 582-7086. Follow her on Twitter at @clairegalofaro.
