Downtown bar area sees violent weekend
No one was hit in the gunfire that erupted in a crowded downtown Five Points Sunday morning, but for one USC student, it meant a long night and a bullet in her car.
“I was working outside at the beer bath at Breakers,” she said. “All of a sudden, we hear this ‘pow-pow-pow-pow-pow.’ I looked at the girl I was working with, and we were like, ‘Was that gunshots?’ The bouncers told us to duck.”
The third-year marketing student asked not to be identified because she’s nervous about what she thinks may have been gang violence and fears retaliation.
When they’d decided the coast was clear, the two stood up and looked across the street at the Rite Aid on Harden Street where the shots had come from — and where they’d both parked their cars. Police had descended upon the parking lot.
“All of a sudden I see them taping my car with crime scene tape,” the student said. “One of the bouncers walked over with me and I walked up to my car and saw bullet holes in the windows.”
Officers had blocked off the area for investigation, so she couldn’t access her vehicle for an hour. She described having her whole perspective changed.
“I started crying, because I was so scared,” she said. “I thought there were going to be more shots fired. I got my brother to come and we talked to the cops and sat there until 3 o’clock in the morning.”
She said an angel must have been looking over Five Points that night for her rear windows and some upholstery to be the shooting’s only casualty, but her experience was only one of several in a litany of violent crimes in Five Points reported to media Monday.
The incident reports, released by Columbia Police Department, detail a weekend of violence and crime in Five Points, but no arrests.
The gunshots that sent the popular bar scene into a panic Sunday morning were fired around 1 a.m. after an alleged robbery, according to a report.
The alleged robbery victim claimed four men dressed in all black — two of whom he said had dreadlocks — knocked him to the ground and stole his wallet, which he said contained $55, before fleeing in a white or light-colored Ford truck, according to the report. Several witnesses saw the truck speeding away from the scene, the report said. Shortly afterward, the gunshots were heard.
“It doesn’t make complete sense,” Columbia police spokeswoman Jennifer Timmons said when asked for more details on the sequence of events. She emphasized that “incident reports are not the Gospel” — they rely on witnesses at the scene and the initial findings of the responding officers.
According to another report, around the same time, another man and his friend told police they’d been walking past Thirsty Parrot’s when the man was bumped into by two unknown men. One of the unknown men confronted the victim verbally, the report said. After the man turned his back to walk away one of them punched him in the head, the report said.
At that point, eight unknown black men began assaulting the man, punching him several times in the face and body while he attempted to guard his face with his arms, according to a witness account in the report. The man’s right forearm was broken and he was taken to a local hospital, according to the report.
A third incident was reported around 2 a.m., a when a man was assaulted near Pop’s NY Pizza. He claimed he was shoved up against a door and punched by seven to 10 men after an altercation, the report said. When he fell to the ground, one or two began to kick him in the chest and head, causing severe lacerations and swelling to his face, according to the report. He may have also suffered severe damage to his skull, the report said. Emergency medical services were called and took him to a local hospital.
Timmons said while the Five Points area is considered a crime “hot spot” and is patrolled frequently by officers, “they can’t be at all places at all times.”
She said she’d need to compile statistical data to know for sure whether the weekend represented a spike in area crime, but she did acknowledge that the number of police reports she sent out Monday was unusual.
“We did have a lot of incidents in the Five Points area, you can’t hide from that fact,” Timmons said. “As to why they’re happening — I wish I could blame it on a full moon.”