Mad Melee Makes for Wild Night for Tosa Police

The had to commit all its available resources Wednesday night to sort out a mass street fight between two extended families that started over a can of charcoal lighter fluid and ended hours later with a second battle in the lobby of the police station.

For about two hours, every Tosa police patrol unit was dispatched to the fight, which spread from a duplex in the 2100 block of North 60th Street into the streets beyond and involved somewhere between a dozen and 20 people, according to Capt. Jeff Sutter.

At various times, the melee involved weapons including a reported gun, multiple knives including a butcher knife, chemical mace, a broomstick, a pair of hedge clippers, rocks, bricks and a hubcap – although it wasn't clear whether the hubcap was intended as a weapon or a defense.

Meanwhile, a man in a holding cell at the station flooded the cell, resisted being handcuffed and assaulted a police officer who had been called back with his partner from delivering a prisoner to the county jail – meaning that for a time, every officer on duty that night was engaged in one or the other of the brawls.

Police arrive: 'Who's that with the hubcap?'

It began at 10:03 p.m., when three squad cars, each with a single officer, were dispatched to the address on North 60th on a report of "a big fight." While en route, a dispatcher called to report a gun was involved. Moments later, another call came, this time to report knives. More units were sent.

As the first units turned south onto 60th from West North Avenue, officers could see people running toward them up the middle of 60th, one of them holding a hubcap. The 15-year-old boy who had the hubcap and a 19-year-old man were immediately arrested while other officers proceeded toward the vortex of the dispute.

At the duplex, they found people on the upper and lower porches screaming profanities at each other. Officers found a T-shirt in the street, broken rocks, one with blood on it, a broomstick in the bushes in front of the house, and a can of pepper spray on the porch.

How it began: 'Who used our lighter fluid?'

As nearly as police could sort it out, here's what happened to start the fracas:

The residents of the upper unit – a woman, her 15-year-old son and her 19-year-old nephew – had just returned from a trip to North Carolina that evening, and the son was sent to take out a bag of garbage. He noticed a charcoal lighter fluid can in the garbage can. Finding the family’s lighter fluid missing from the garage, he suspected that the residents of the lower unit had used it while they were gone.

He told his mother, who went to confront her neighbors downstairs. The woman of the house was polite, but a 50-year-old man who lives with her became enraged, denied using her lighter fluid and began shouting obscenities and threats at her. He told her he was going to call the woman’s sons, who he said were “goons,” to settle the matter.

The first woman's son and nephew came downstairs while she went back up, and within minutes she saw a car pull up. A woman got out, went into the lower unit and came back out with a broomstick and a knife and began hitting the 15-year-old with the stick.

She said that more cars pulled up, carrying sons of the downstairs couple and their girlfriends. They called the upstairs woman out of her apartment, and when she wouldn't come out, one of them wielded a hedge clipper and broke out the window on her door.

Taking it to the street

The fighting became general on the downstairs porch until someone sprayed chemical mace indiscriminately at the group and sent the crowd into the streets to battle with rocks, bricks and knives.

At least four people, including the 50-year-old man, now holding a butcher knife, chased the two teens up the street (one of them picking up the stray hubcap on the way), which was when the police arrived and put a stop to the nonsense.

Or so they thought.

Having arrested four people – the 15-year-old and the 19-year-old from upstairs for assault and battery, the 50-year-old man from downstairs for endangering safety with a dangerous weapon, and that man's 47-year-old sister who had used the broomstick and a knife, for assault and battery – the police finally secured the scene and hauled the suspects back to the station.

It isn't over yet

Then the woman who rents the upstairs flat showed up at the station, in the company of an elderly couple, to try to get her son and nephew released. While she was waiting, another sister of the man from the downstairs unit showed up to try to get her relatives out of jail.

When she turned and saw the woman from the upper flat sitting in the lobby, the sister of the downstairs man began threatening her. She accused the other woman of calling out people to attack her brother and at one point said, “Now what if I jump you in the police station?”

When a police clerk thought she saw a punch being thrown, she called for help and weary officers broke up the fight and arrested the woman from the upstairs flat for disorderly conduct. But when they reviewed lobby surveillance camera footage of the affair, they reversed that and charged the other woman, having determined that she was the aggressor.

Every available unit...

The trying night for the police force was further aggravated when at 12:13 a.m., a 55-year-old Milwaukee man was arrested for battery to a police officer after he stuffed a wadded toilet paper roll in the drain of the sink and flooded his holding cell.

He resisted being handcuffed in order to be removed from the cell, and finally mule-kicked an officer in the knee. The injured officer was taken to Wisconsin Heart Hospital for evaluation.

The man was being held for questioning in a burglary earlier in the evening – no details were yet available on that crime – and the officers restraining him included two who had been called to hurry back to the station from delivering a prisoner in yet another crime because every other officer was assisting in the Battle of 60th Street.