Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 4, 1995 TAG: 9506050029
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
For as long as some people can remember, there's been bad blood between two groups of young people from Galax and Wytheville. Some say it's a feud over girlfriends and boyfriends that's passed from one generation to the next.
"See, Galax and Wytheville have always argued over stupid stuff," said Nykkie Gambill, 19, who lives in Galax.
Hard words have flown at ball games. Fights have busted up parties.
But there's never been anything like what happened last weekend at a town park and recreation center in Wytheville: A melee broke out among as many as 125 people. Fights swirled through the crowd - with as many as 15 or 20 people throwing punches at once. The brawlers beat and kicked each other, smashed car windows and cursed and defied police until state troopers in riot gear moved in.
It took 95 law officers from four agencies to quell the violence.
Police charged six people from Galax and three people from North Carolina who came to the party with the group from Galax. Police also charged two men from Wytheville.
Some were charged with disorderly conduct; most were charged with unlawful assembly, a felony.
As police try to sort out what happened, several people from Galax complain that they're catching most of the blame for a brawl they didn't start. They claim that they came in a small group - no more than a dozen men and a half-dozen women - and that people from Wytheville "jumped" them, beat them and bashed their cars with bricks and a club. They say police failed to protect them, and it's unfair that they were charged while many others got away.
"I still don't see how out of 80 people, only two of them get arrested - and out of 16 of us, nine of us got arrested," said Anthony Dickerson, a former Galax resident who now lives in Winston-Salem, N.C. "It was no way that we could have caused no ruckus." By the time the trouble started, "there was just 12 of us. Who in their right mind is going to go start a fight with 60 or 70 people?''
Dickerson and his friends claim they were trying to leave before violence started - but they were attacked before they could get to their cars.
"It's basically like, if we go over there by ourselves, nine times out of 10 they'll jump on us," Dickerson, 26, said. "Every time we go, we feel like we have to fight our way out of Wytheville."
Police say they had no way of telling who was who amid the mob scene, and whether one group was the aggressor or not.
By the time he arrived, State Police Sgt. David Shaver said, "everybody was the aggressor."
He said officers had no way of knowing where people were from until after they had booked them. Shaver said most of the people in the Galax group were arrested because they showed up at the jail and defied orders to leave.
Albert Newberry, Wytheville's director of public safety, believes the rivalry between the groups from the two towns helped spark the melee, but he can't say whether one group started it.
"Everybody was pointing the finger at everybody else: 'You ought to arrest him,''' Newberry said.
Law enforcement officers in Wythe County - a quiet place where murder and even robbery are rare - had never seen anything quite like it. Shaver said the only things he could compare it to were prison uprisings, the bitter Pittston coal strike or the 1989 Labor Day riots in Virginia Beach.
"It was just total chaos," Shaver said. "They were chasing people down and beating them on the ground. As quick as we'd pull them off, they'd run off after somebody else."
`This is my party'
The rivalry between young people in Galax and Wytheville goes back at least 20 years. Debbie McKinney, 37, remembers tensions when she was in high school in Wytheville in the early 1970s. "It wasn't as bad as it is now," she recalled. "It was mostly words being said or pushing instead of fighting."
Her niece, Chuwanna Player, said: "It started off Wytheville girls liking Galax guys. And Wytheville guys got jealous." She dated a guy from Galax in high school a few years back, and caught flak for it.
Dickerson and others say fights between people from the two groups broke up a couple of house parties in recent months. Dickerson said one fight was over someone's girlfriend, and a guy from Galax got the best of a guy from Wytheville. He contends the Wytheville guy must have been plotting revenge.
Still, Player didn't expect trouble when she invited friends from Galax to the graduation party she was throwing for her cousin the night of May 27. She and her husband rented the town recreation center next to Elizabeth Brown Memorial Park.
When the Galax people arrived around 11 p.m., Player said, one of them, Sylvester Jackson, came to her. She said he told her, "We're going to walk in with you because we don't want no trouble started."
Then, Player said, some guys from Wytheville started taunting the people from Galax. She said she went over and told them: "Ain't going to be no trouble. This is my party."
"All right, all right," they said. "We were just talking."
Dickerson said he rounded up everyone from Galax - "If it's going to be a problem, we're all going to leave" - and they headed for the door. Then the place exploded.
"As soon as I turned my back," Player said, "I just saw people heading out the door, throwing bottles, hitting people in the back of the head."
"Turn the music off," someone hollered. "Turn the music off."
Nykkie Gambill said people knocked her to the floor and started hitting her. A mass of people collided in the doorway, and the brawl spilled out into the parking lot. "They were coming out of the windows to get outside," Gambill said.
The Galax people said they tried to make it to the cars to get away, but there were too many people beating them - and smashing their car windows.
"They were trying to leave and Wytheville surrounded their cars," Player said.
The town police station is just across a creek from the rec center. A call about the fight went out at 11:46 p.m.
The first officer on the scene was met by a stream of people who came running at her, screaming that someone in a car was destroying other cars.
The officer saw a gold Datsun 200X with "several subjects hanging over it, beating the car," according to her report. The car was moving back and forth "striking what sounded like other vehicles in the lot" and appeared to be "trying to run over people in the lot."
Jackson - who goes by "Tiny" - was behind the wheel. He said he wasn't trying to hit anyone: He was just trying to get away. They smashed his black-painted back window with a club, and glass came flying all over the car, he said. People were on the hood and roof beating his car, breaking the other windows and trying to pull him out. He said there's still a basketball-shoe print from where somebody kicked the side panel. A garage later estimated the repairs at $2,700 - more than the car is worth.
Player said said eight or 10 people went after Jackson's car. "He was trying to get away. They were kicking it, everything. If they could have got him out, they would have killed him."
Police say Jackson careened out of the lot, and for a moment looked as if he were going to hit officers or their vehicles. They arrested Jackson and charged him with reckless driving and disorderly conduct.
"I don't know if he was trying to get away or what," Newberry said. "But evidently he was smashing other vehicles and trying to hit other people. And they were trying to get in after him. That'll have to be sorted out" as the investigation continues.
Fights raged and police tried to disperse the crowd. People cursed and taunted the officers. Finally, about 12:30 a.m., state troopers massed in riot gear ordered people to move, then cleared the park.
Several people from Galax headed to the jail to swear out charges against the people they say attacked them. They say someone in the magistrate's office told them to wait outside in the parking lot.
Officers arrived and told them to go home.
Dickerson said they were in their car, trying to pull out, when police stopped them and arrested them, charging them with unlawful assembly.
But Sgt. Shaver said they were exchanging words with police and challenging officers "to see what would happen - if they were going to make a response to them." They were arrested, Shaver said, because they waited until the troopers started to move in before they got in their cars to leave.
Officers also arrested a man from Wytheville and charged him with disorderly conduct. He showed up at the jail with his mother to complain about getting sprayed with pepper spray back at the park - and both he and his mom ended up cursing the officers.
`Violent self-help'
The near-riot left two troopers hurt - one broke a finger, the other wrenched his back. And it left Wytheville police vowing to increase training in dealing with explosive crowds. Newberry, the public safety director, said that will help keep officers and residents safer. But "you can't make people like each other. Government can't do that."
Newberry said he can't confirm or refute the claims by the Galax people that they were surrounded and attacked.
"There are always two sides to the story," Newberry said. "I don't doubt for a minute that the verbal abuse was there, and they probably did get jumped."
But he said their hands aren't clean because "they jumped back" and fueled the battle by using "violent self-help." He said they were charged because they were given a chance to leave and they refused.
Dickerson said he stayed and fought and broke up fights because he wanted to protect his brother, cousin and friends.
But, he concedes, "the judge, he's not going to take our word over the cops." He said he's been in trouble before on disturbing-the-peace and drunken-driving charges. "If I get fined, I get fined. I don't regret anything I did. I wasn't going to leave my brother and my friends and let people beat on them."
He said there's only thing he would have done differently: He would never have come to Wytheville in the first place.
Dickerson said he'll return just "two more times - to court."
by CNB