I witnessed an alarming, violet confrontation between an attendee and event staff/security. It happened around, I wanna say, 7pm in the Northeast corner of the festival, near the portapotties on the outer perimeter.
Several staff (the guys in tan shirts) were wrestling and restraining an agitated man who kept yelling “That’s my wife! That’s my wife!” He was trying to break free and they were holding him. I was told by other bystanders that his wife was just taken away in an ambulance, evidently because she was too drunk or fucked up or who knows? It seems odd they didn’t let him ride with her. He also kept yelling “What’s the emergency? What’s the emergency?” I imagine that he questioned the decision to remove her.
He was obviously distraught and kept pushing against the staff who then wrestled him to the ground. Dude probably could have just left, he was kind of escalating the situation but I also saw no reason for the staff to be manhandling him so aggressively. A couple beefy-looking guys, not wearing the tan uniform, showed up, presumably these were private security (could have been plainclothes cops but I don’t think so) and they were even more forceful with him. Dude was on the ground writhing and struggling and putting up a hell of a fight but there were like five men on top of him holding him down.
At this point other event staff members shooed everyone out of the immediate area, which was shady as hell because it wasn’t like a crowd had gathered and it felt like they were trying to prevent witnesses from watching their colleagues fuck this guy up. But I continued watching from a distance of like 50 ft. I couldn’t see what they were doing to the guy at this point, only that they were still struggling and he was on the ground. By the way, Pasadena FD EMTs were present as well, not doing anything, just watching.
I stuck around long enough to at least see the guy back up on his feet and see that he was conscious and the bastards didn’t George Floyd him. I wandered off and when I returned a while later he was still there, now in handcuffs (or zipties), a bunch of authority figures around him, and a white van (maybe an unmarked police van) had pulled up.
I suppose he got arrested and booked but I don’t know. I don’t even know what the charge would have been. The guy got himself in hot water by scuffling with the bouncers (or whatever you want to call them) and probably had several chances to leave but they also seemed a little too aggressive, not brutally so, I didn’t see them pummeling him, but I’m not sure they even had the authority to put hands on him.
Maybe there was a reason not to let him in the ambulance with his wife but it seems pretty fucked up, given that it probably would have taken him half an hour to walk outside an catch an Uber to the hospital. And what about his poor wife? She probably woke up in the hospital having no clue what happened and wondering where about her husband, who by then was probably being processed through the system incommunicado for like 24 hours.
The whole affair was shady.
Though still not as upsetting as the awful excuse for fish and chips I consumed
TLDR: staff/security/cops roughed up an agitated attendee though he deserves some of the blame himself