Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 3, 1995 TAG: 9503030100
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: BRIAN KELLEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
No one was seriously injured in the fight, which started around 1 a.m. in the upstairs lounge of Sharkey's restaurant at 216 N. Main St.
But two male bouncers and a female disc jockey were treated for injuries and released from Montgomery Regional Hospital. One of them, Jonathan White, received stitches after being struck in the head with a bottle while going to the rescue of the DJ, who had gone down after a punch. The other bouncers didn't require a hospital visit, though one had an earring ripped out.
The brawl sent a crowd of more than 50 people - some bragging about the punches they had thrown - onto Main Street. The crowd shut down traffic as nine police cars and an ambulance pulled up in front of the restaurant in the heart of downtown Blacksburg.
Town police said the restaurant brawl was the first major one downtown in nearly a year and comes after stepped-up weekend patrols had slowed last year's trend toward drunken fisticuffs. They had no immediate plans to extend those Thursday-Friday-Saturday patrols to other weeknights.
Stephanie Rogol, Sharkey's owner and the manager on duty when the fight broke out, said she believed the fight that started everything was staged. "There was one bouncer that first saw the fight break out and went to break it up and 10 people jumped on him," Rogol said. Other bouncers and the DJ ran to the first man's aid.
She noted that none of the instigators was injured while all of her bouncers who tried to stop the melee were assaulted. Also, the bartender's tips disappeared during the confusion.
Rogol said warrants have been obtained charging five men from Galax with assault. She blamed the entire incident on out-of-towners.
Last semester, because of trouble with out-of-towners, the restaurant refused to admit them late at night on weekends, when it turns into a nightclub with a dance floor. Rogol now plans to restrict late-night access to people with two IDs - including one for a college - every night of the week.
"The thing that bothers me most, when these things happen, it looks like college students," Rogol said. "Those college students were good."
Rogol said she didn't foresee any legal problems in discriminating against nonstudents. "It's a private place. I can allow [in] anyone I want to," she said.
Because of the difficulties, Sharkey's will drop its dance floor and use the upstairs area for pool tables, she said.
At the next meeting of the Blacksburg Downtown Restaurant and Bar Association, Rogol said she will renew her call for all the major downtown nightspots to require two IDs, one of them a college ID.
Bar fights in downtown Blacksburg are nothing new. In fact, they are somewhat of a rite of spring in most college towns: the volatile result of the mixture of alcohol-fueled aggression and youth.
On an unseasonably warm night in late February 1994, Blacksburg police shut down an overcrowded private party at the Hokie House restaurant - located just one block uphill from Sharkey's - after a fight outside sent one woman to Montgomery Regional with a head injury.
Slightly more than a month later, a fight inside the now-closed Hawaii Kai Lounge - located across North Main Street from Sharkey's - turned bloody when a man pulled a martial arts knife and slashed four people. No one was seriously injured. Police never made an arrest.
Capt. Walter Mosby, commander of the Blacksburg police uniformed patrol, said beginning in the late spring of last year the department sent two officers to patrol downtown on foot on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. The police stopped the extra patrols during the summer, then reinstituted them with the return of Virginia Tech students in August. "We've had a good response from having extra personnel downtown," he said. Though drunk-in-public arrests are routine, the only major incident since they began was in late January when a severely beaten man was found on a downtown street.
Staff writer Madelyn Rosenberg and photographer Keith Greene contributed information to this article.
by CNB