WISCONSIN – Witnesses’ accounts claim everything from dozens to hundreds of young  black people beating white people as they left State Fair Thursday  night.  Authorities have not given official estimates of the number of people involved in the attacks.
“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.
“They were attacking everybody for no reason whatsoever.”   “It was 100% racial,” claimed Eric, an Iraq war veteran from St. Francis who says young people beat on his car.  “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.”
Eric, a war veteran, said that the scene he saw Thursday outside State Fair compares to what he saw in combat.  “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.”
Another witness, who asked to remain anonymous, said, “it was like a scene you needed the National Guard to control.”   “To me, it looked like a scene out of a movie,” claimed the anonymous witness.  “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.”
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.
“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.”
Eric then claimed that he saw hundreds of young black people coming down a sidewalk.
“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.”
Then, Eric talked about trying to get out of the car to help the victim.

“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.”
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.
“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.”
Eric expressed anger at the State Fair Police for what he considered a lack of response.
“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.”
“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.”
Fair worker: attacks not limited to outside fairgrounds
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.”
The witness, who asked not to be identified, couldn’t say for certain if only white people were being attacked.
“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.”
A State Fair spokeswoman said that there were arrests made involving the incidents on the grounds.
He said that as the violence happened, he was “getting ready to grab my cash register and run.”
“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.”
The man said hoping to bring family on Friday, but has decided not to.
“I was planning on bringing my two kids to the fair tonight.  I won’t be.  We’ll go to the zoo instead.”
Woman: Teenagers in mob didn’t attend rap concert
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.
“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.
“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.”
She described what she saw as she left the fair.
“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.

“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!?’ ”
The witness also told us that not every African-American teenager outside the fair grounds acted violent.  “We continued to move towards the parking lot, through even more black teenagers. Thankfully this part of the crowd was not violent.”  (read more)

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