4/25/15, "
Officials asking fans to stay inside Baltimore ballpark due to violent protests outside @EddieInTheYard," News on the Min Twitter, 6:48pm. [This time stamp appears to be Pacific time since the Baltimore, Md. game was a night game. ed]
Red Sox at Baltimore Orioles, 5-4 Orioles in 10 innings
============================
4/25/15, "
Cheers as the gates at Camden yards open," Regan Page twitter, 7pm [This time stamp appears to be Pacific time since the Baltimore, Md. game was a night game. ed]
============================
4/25/15,
"War Zone: Baltimore Erupts Into Violence, Chaos as #BlackLivesMatter Riots Rage," Matthew Boyle, Breitbart News, Baltimore, Md.
"Personally, I wasn’t supposed to be on the job tonight as a reporter.
After a long news week and as several of my contemporaries lived high
on the hog down in D.C. at the so-called “Nerd Prom,”
me and my brother
left D.C. to go see our Boston Red Sox play the Baltimore Orioles at
Oriole Park at Camden Yards I hate the White House Correspondents’
Dinner—it represents everything I think is wrong with Washington, making
celebrities out of news media and politicians—and given the fact I grew
up just outside Boston
I figured seeing the Red Sox play in Baltimore
would be a great reprieve from the political culture. Boy was I wrong.
My brother and I arrived in Baltimore just outside Camden Yards about
an hour before the game, and went into Bullpen Bar—one of three iconic
all-brick building bars right outside the stadium—for a beer before the
Sox took on the O’s. I usually make it up here for a game or two every
year, and have always found Orioles fans to be pleasant. We’re united in
our hatred of the Yankees.
Bullpen Bar sits between Pickles Pub and Sliders Bar & Grill.
Outside each of the brick-faced bars, on the days of Orioles Games, each
bar puts out barricades about 20 feet from their front doors.
Shoulder-to-shoulder crowds of fans from each team—the Orioles, and in
the case of Saturday night, the Red Sox—pack into three bars and the
barricaded-off space in front before each game. Inside and outside of
each, bartenders serve “cheap beer”—or so the $6-per-tall-boy-cans are
advertised on big signs—while hotdogs, sausages and other pastime
favorites are sold by each and by vendors who set up tents across the
street. The blue collar culture—and really friendly people—are what make
Baltimore baseball games so much fun, and there’s no better place to
kick off an adventure into Camden Yards than here.
But on Saturday night, after my brother and I
finished off our beers
at Bullpen and began walking across the street to the stadium, planning
to make our way to our seats after getting inside, chaos broke out.
Several people across the street from these bars—between there and
the stadium, which is less than 100 yards away—were holding signs that
said #BlackLivesMatter. They were protesting the death of Freddie Gray,
who
Agence France Press newswire wrote “died last Sunday from spinal
injuries, a week after his arrest in the city’s impoverished west side.”
“In a press conference Friday, officials acknowledged Gray should
have received medical help at the moment of his arrest, when he was seen
by bystanders — and caught on video — howling in apparent pain,” AFP
wrote, providing the background of the simmering tensions in the
mid-Atlantic port town.
“They also revealed that Gray, contrary to
police department policy, was not buckled into his seat in the van,
which made at least three unexplained stops on its way to the Western
District police station. Gray died Sunday with 80 percent of his spine
severed at the neck, lawyers for his family have said. His funeral is
scheduled for Monday. Six officers have been suspended with pay as the
police investigation inches closer to a May 1 deadline to submit
findings to a Maryland state prosecutor, who could decide to press
charges.”
All of a sudden—literally as my brother and I walked out of
Bullpen—everything went haywire. What were peaceful marchers holding up
signs turned into violent rioters. Innocent fans standing by were
confronted by the rioters, who physically and verbally threateningly
engaged many of them—and then the protesters got even more violent.
All of a sudden, beer bottles and cans, and other projectiles were
lobbed by the protesters into the crowds of fans. To get those
projectiles, the protesters stole them forcibly from the bartenders and
vendors set up outside each of those three bars. One beer can whizzed by
my brother’s face, missing him by about six inches, and more flew all
over the crowded area.
The crowd of protesters then stopped a blue station wagon carrying a
white family as they tried to drive past Pickles, Bullpen and Sliders
along a narrow one-way stretch between the bars and the main road.
As a
horde of them smashed their open and closed fists on the hood of the
car—while impeding them by standing in front of them—the driver backed
up on the one way pass in a desperate attempt to get out of dodge. Then,
stopped on the other side with nowhere to go, protesters ripped open
the passenger door of the car and began reaching around inside the
vehicle.
As hundreds of people looked on, including several police
officers who didn’t engage the violent protesters, the white woman in
the front seat—middle-aged and a little heavyset with dark hair—was
visibly terrified. The group of black men who ripped open the car door
suddenly realized they were separated from the larger group of
protesters and abandoned their quest to seemingly either carjack the
station wagon or rob the people inside in front of hundreds, driving out
of the one-way street back onto the main road and presumably out of
dodge.
As projectiles continued flying everywhere from each part of the
crowd—like a war-zone—another black man then charged into the crowd of
Red Sox and Orioles fans standing outside Pickles Pub and tore the metal
barricades apart throwing them into the now-crowded one-way pass where
the assaulted station wagon was a moment ago.
My brother, at this point, was screaming at the group of five or so
police officers. “Why aren’t you doing anything? They’re hurting people!
They’re hurting people! They’re violent!” he yelled at them as they
continued ignoring him and not engaging or attempting to stop the
violence.
I had been trying—unsuccessfully, as I never use my phone for this—to
capture some useful videos and photos of what was going on. My reporter
gear, including an iPad I specifically use for the purpose of covering
this kind of thing, was back in my apartment just outside D.C. and I
really never take photos or video with my phone. After I went back
through them later, in the middle of the chaos, they all came out blurry
and unusable.
Nonetheless, fearing for my safety and for my brother’s safety, at
this point I grabbed him and pulled him aside—and said “we need to go,
we need to go into the stadium.”
We moved along as fast as we could around Camden Yards to get
inside—Orioles officials had closed down several gates that are normally
open so we had to go almost halfway around the place to get in—and got
through the gate as I Tweeted updates of what I saw and what went down
so hopefully other media would pull through and cover the violence that
was going on.
Well, I’d find out later, of course they wouldn’t—they
were too busy praising themselves at Nerd Prom. But my brother and I
made it to our seats and hoped it all would be over soon, and the game
would go on as planned.
The game started without a hitch, and while fans buzzed and hissed
back and forth in discussion about the insanity going on outside, it all
seemed to be fine—and mostly under control—so my brother and I went
back to enjoying the Sox face off against the Orioles.
As the game progressed, however, the situation outside throughout
Baltimore clearly got worse. All of a sudden, several police helicopters
took to the skies and fans sitting around us talked about how they got
text messages from friends watching the news at home throughout the
Baltimore area warning them to get out of the stadium while they still
could.
The game was close, and at about 9:45 p.m.—2 hours and 45 minutes
into the game—an announcement came over the loudspeaker in the stadium:
The mayor of Baltimore, due to a public safety emergency outside, had
“asked” everyone inside to stay in the stadium
and not try to leave.
The Red Sox had just tied what was a 3-2 Baltimore lead in the top of
the ninth inning. It was headed to at least the bottom of the ninth,
and perhaps extra innings, so we went to run to the bathroom together
real fast and
then found the gate right there—E-1—was locked and several
Orioles staffers were standing in front of it. I asked one of them if
we were allowed to leave, and they said no. We were, along with the
15,000 or so still in the stadium, being forcibly kept there by the
Baltimore mayor’s authority. Several people around us lamented that the
Orioles should open the bars back up—
they stop serving alcohol after the
seventh inning stretch—and give out free beer due to the chaos.
My brother and I got back to our seats in time to see the Orioles
blow it in the bottom of the ninth and got ready for extra innings.
In
the top of the tenth, the Red Sox took the lead 4-3 and the Baltimore
mayor’s decision to keep everyone in the stadium remained in effect. If
the Orioles didn’t exactly tie in the bottom of the tenth—and the
mayor’s decision remained in effect—there would be 15,000 people trying
to leave who couldn’t. All of a sudden, then, another announcement came
over the loudspeaker and on the big screen at the park:
the mayor lifted
the ban on people leaving the stadium.
Thank God, because the Orioles
won it in the bottom of the tenth inning with a walk off home run—
and
right after they hit it, my brother and I bolted out of the stadium and
hopped in a Baltimore city cab, which we took all the way back to our
apartment just outside D.C. The cabbie told us the protests that were
going on all night were “crazy.” After everything that went down, the
Red Sox loss hurt much less than seeing a great city–Baltimore–turn into
madness."
================================
4/25/15, "
Violence erupts at Baltimore police death protest," AFP, Jim Watson, via Yahoo News
"But the mood shifted dramatically when
scores of
protesters moved to the
vicinity of the Camden Yards baseball stadium, scene of an evening
Baltimore Orioles-Boston Red Sox game....
Fans at the baseball game,
which went beyond the standard nine
innings due to a tie, were told to remain in the stadium, "due to an
ongoing public safety issue."
One police spokesman blamed the trouble on "isolated pockets" of individuals who were believed to have come from out of town.
Later
in the evening, dozens of police formed a cordon around the Western
District police station, scene of nightly protests since Gray died. NBC
affiliate WBAL reported two arrests, witnessed from its news helicopter."...
Labels: Red Sox fan at Baltimore Orioles game reports police did nothing to stop violent rioters from hurting people
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