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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.
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Milwaukee Police confirmed there were assaults outside the
fair.
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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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Authorities have not given official estimates of the number of
people involved in the attacks.
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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.
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“They were attacking everybody for no reason whatsoever.”
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“It was 100% racial,” claimed Eric, an Iraq war veteran from St.
Francis who says young people beat on his car.
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“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.”
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Eric, a war veteran, said that the scene he saw Thursday outside
State Fair compares to what he saw in combat.
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“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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Another witness, who asked to remain anonymous, said, “it was like
a scene you needed the National Guard to control.”
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“To me, it looked like a scene out of a movie,” claimed the
anonymous witness.
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“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.”
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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
.
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“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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Roffers further described what witnesses said happened to the man
who was lying in the street.
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“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.”
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One person claimed that someone was knocked off a
motorcycle.
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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.
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Some witnesses described attacks on the State Fair Grounds as
well.
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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.”
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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.
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That sergeant explained that some injuries were serious, and local
hospitals were attending to the injured.
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As of early Friday morning, Milwaukee Police said they had no one
in custody.
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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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“I think once we get all the info in it’ll be just like that, like
what happened in Riverwest,” said the police sergeant.
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West Allis Police ask you to call them at 414-302-8000 if you have
any information.
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Eric: “I feared for my life”
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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.
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“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.”
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Eric then claimed that he saw hundreds of young black people coming
down a sidewalk.
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“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.”
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Then, Eric talked about trying to get out of the car to help the
victim.
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“My wife pulled me back in because she didn’t want me to get hit.
Thankfully, there was surprising 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.”
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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.
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“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.”
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Eric expressed anger at the State Fair Police for what he
considered a lack of response.
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“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.”
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“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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Fair worker: attacks not limited to outside
fairgrounds
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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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The witness, who asked not to be identified, couldn’t say for
certain if only white people were being attacked.
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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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A State Fair spokeswoman said that there were arrests made
involving the incidents on the grounds.
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He said that as the violence happened, he was “getting ready to
grab my cash register and run.”
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“Not to mention this type of behavior started around 7pm and forced
me to close down my stand at 9pm. It scared the paying customers
out of the midway.”
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The man said hoping to bring family on Friday, but has decided not
to.
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“I was planning on bringing my two kids to the fair tonight. I
won’t be. We’ll go to the zoo instead.”
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Woman: Teenagers in mob didn’t attend rap concert
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One woman who asked not to be identified tells us that contrary to
some belief, the young people involved in the mob did not go to the
rap concert that night.
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“The mob of black teenagers involved in the beatings and damage
outside of State Fair last night were not there for the MC Hammer
concert,” said the woman.
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“I attended that concert with three of my friends last night and
the crowd was mostly white and adult (as are my friends and I). Any
kids there seemed to be with parents.”
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She described what she saw as she left the fair.
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“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.
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“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!?’ “
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The witness also told us that not every African-American teenager
outside the fair grounds acted violent.
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“We continued to move towards the parking lot, through even more
black teenagers. Thankfully this part of the crowd was not
violent.”
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Roffers: “What in the hell’s going on
there?”
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Roffers described his emotions and reactions to the attacks outside
the park.
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“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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He said his injuries were limited to a headache.
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Roffers said the attack wouldn’t stop him from attending the State
Fair.
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“We will be going back,” said Roffers.
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“It’s a family event for us. We get together with our family and
we do stuff at the park to enjoy the fair. My biggest concern is
that the State Fair Park Police and West Allis get their heads out
of their butts and figure out how to do some security over there.
This isn’t the first year State Fair has been going on. They
should know what the heck they’ve got to do and where they’ve got
to have people in place by now.”
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He said that the fear spread beyond those who he believed were the
target.
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“There were a lot of people scared,” claimed Roffers.
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“There were even some young black girls. They were screaming.
They were running across the road. This one girl was like, ‘I
don’t know how I’m going to get out of here. I’m all by myself.’
My wife heard her saying that. She said, ‘Walk with us. Stay with
us and you’ll be OK.’ We told her we were going down the street.
If she needed any assistance, we were just going down to our car.
She needed to go quite a way.”
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“There was this terror going on when you leave the place, you just
wonder. Luckily, all the violence that was happening stayed right
close by the park entrance. As we got a block away from the park,
that’s when the cops started showing up.”
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He said the lack of police and security presence will bring about
his complaint up the various channels of State Fair and local
police.
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“They should be able to provide safety and traffic control,” said
Roffers. “I’ve never worried about it before.”
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He said he would give a written complaint to the State Fair and put
in a call to West Allis Police, but that’s not all.
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“I will be contacting the State Fair Park Board and I’m going to
chew on their butts a little bit about what happened.”
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State Fair spokeswoman: “Unfortunate situation, hopefully
an isolated situation.”
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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.
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“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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Though witnesses had reported incidents inside the fair, she said
the problems were mainly outside the fairgrounds.
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“Not so much inside,” claimed O’Leary.
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“We had complete control inside of what was happening inside of our
gates. It’s what what spread into the neighborhoods.”
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O’Leary also pointed out that the fair has “taken measures already
with the bag checks, when you come into the fair,” but will
increase authorities’ presence for the remaining days at the
fair.
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“We will be taking severe measures, significant measures. We are
in task force already, circling back around, doing everything that
we can to make sure the experience is enjoyable and that the safety
is insured,” said O’Leary.
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“They see the yellow security shirts. We have mounted police. We
have bike police. We have our patrolling police. We have
undercover police. That’s all because that’s exactly what we
want. We want the safety measures intact at every turn.”
