Reports of gunshots, possession filed
By the time its Friday pool party spiraled out of control, the Woodlands was already in the throes of an eventful week.
From the wee hours of Wednesday, Aug. 22, to Sunday night Aug. 26, Richland County sheriff's deputies responded to at least seven incidents at the popular off-campus apartment complex — including a fight that ended with gunshots and a smattering of vandalism.
Mike Swope, marketing director at the Dovetail Companies, which owns the Woodlands, wouldn't comment on the incidents Wednesday afternoon, beyond saying that the complex has security on site.
Early Saturday, at about 2:15 a.m., a fight between two men, both of whom are listed as USC students, broke out outside of an apartment. Things escalated, according to a police report, until shots were fired.
Police found the gun, a .9 mm Taurus pistol, in a bedroom closet inside, after Anthony Day, 25, told an officer he'd fired one shot.
Brown, the 21-year-old victim, showed visible injuries, but the report did not elaborate on their extent.
Brown opted not to press charges, according to the report, but Day was issued tickets for shooting a firearm within 200 yards of a dwelling and for simple possession, after a search found a grinder with a "green leafy substance" in his pocket, the report said.
That night, at around 11 p.m., a shot rang out in the Woodlands again.
An officer saw a car, possibly a white Oldsmobile Aurora, speed into the apartment complex.
He shined his flashlight at it and yelled for the driver, described as a college-aged white man with dark hair, to slow down. He shouted back at the officer, "F--- you," according to the report.
The officer watched the car go into a parking lot and followed it on foot.
But the car didn't stop and slowly moved toward him. The officer yelled again several times for the driver to stop.
Instead, the man floored it, and the officer dove out of the way, as he fired his gun at the car, which continued on and sped out of the area, according to the report.
The rest of the week saw plenty of action, too.
According to incident reports, a security guard hired by the apartment complex pepper sprayed a man after he approached an apartment early Wednesday morning. A man was arrested Saturday morning for tearing a tree from the ground, and a soup can sailed through a sleeping resident's window Sunday night, shattering it.
But the weekend's pool party garnered the lion's share of the attention, as some 500 people gathered Friday afternoon and a video of the booze-soaked affair that saw young women remove their bikini tops went viral online.
Police made one arrest as they broke up groups of revelers, according to a report released Wednesday afternoon.
An officer began telling partygoers they would have to leave. One, a 21-year-old woman listed as a student, asked why.
She refused, according to the report, using profanity and becoming "boisterous" as she refused to show identification or give her name multiple times.
She was arrested and escorted from the pool.
On the way out, though, she began moving away from an officer, before trying to ram into him to knock him into the pool.
She was taken to the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center, the report said, and has been charged with disorderly conduct.