THE NEWS DESK
The News Desk is a collection of news, notes and breaking items affecting the Fredericksburg community.
F.W. Sullivan’s windows victim of Ravens-Patriots fan dispute
UPDATE: Fredericksburg Police Department releases incident reports for same time frame as F.W. Sullivan’s for all city nightspots.
The busted window
The hard hits surrounding Sunday’s American Football Conference championship game apparently weren’t limited to the football field in Foxboro, Mass.
Fredericksburg police say at least two of the hits took place early Saturday at a nightspot in the city, where fans of the Baltimore Ravens and the New England Patriots took turns throwing each other through a restaurant’s windows.
City police spokeswoman Natatia Bledsoe said the altercation erupted about 2 a.m. at F.W. Sullivan’s at 409 William St. The business was about to close when two groups who had expressed their loyalties to the opposing teams in Sunday’s title game got into a brawl.
A fan of each team was thrown through separate windows. All of the combatants had left the immediate area by the time police arrived.
However, a city officer found three of the Ravens fans — all of them live in Tennessee — walking near Amelia and Princess Anne streets. They admitted they’d been in a fight and one of them was bleeding severely from the elbow. That 28-year-old man, who is 6 feet 2 inches tall and 190 pounds, had been thrown through one of the windows.
The men told police they were attacked by a group of Patriot fans as they were leaving the restaurant while shouting, “Go Ravens!” One of them had thrown a Patriot fan through a window, police said.
That man, 30-year-old Brad Mullins of Gray, Tenn., was charged with felony destruction of property and placed in the Rappahannock Regional Jail. The injured Ravens fan declined to go to the hospital despite being advised to do so by medical personnel, Bledsoe said.
None of the Patriot fans involved in the brawl were located, Bledsoe said. It was not clear how many combatants there were.
In unrelated William Street restaurant news, a pane of glass was broken out of the front door at Jake & Mike’s on Saturday night or Sunday morning, and the cash register and its contents were stolen. The investigation is ongoing.
-Keith Epps
Emails that started the F.W. Sullivan’s controversy in Fredericksburg
Here is the email chain that prompted news reports about concerns regarding police incidents reported at F.W. Sullivan’s restaurant and nightspot in downtown Fredericksburg.
Email from City Council member Bea Paolucci to Kathleen Dooley and other city officials.
Kathleen,
I know another pane of glass was broken out a couple of weeks ago and
there have been issues with overcrowding at the restaurant since they
opened.
Can you please check how many calls/incidents this new restaurant has
had so far?
Email from Fredericksburg Police Chief David Nye to city officials:
Bea and Kathleen, one of my officers already put together a list of
incidents since December 4, 2011. We are going to discuss them at our
meeting on February 2. The officers had a talk with them last weekend.
Email from City Council member Brad Ellis to other city officials and media:
Thank you Chief.
Council and Staff, We need to keep track of the number of incidents
very closely and fine each violator accordingly once the have three
documented violations of our Public Nuisance ordinance. I’m not sure
if our current policy allows for this but if not, lets make the change
ASAP. Furthermore, we need to decide how many violations we are
willing to tolerate before we decide to shut a business down.
As a Council we need to empower our police department as much as
possible with our ordinances so that we can severely crack down on
these issues and, if necessary, close the doors on a business. Our
Public Nuisance ordinance was recently passed but does it go far
enough?
Lastly, we need to put our heads together and figure out how to
prevent anymore bars from coming into downtown unless they sell $300
bottles of wine and $100 glasses of scotch to ensure they do not
attract the type of clientele who are prone to throwing each other
through windows and/or beating each other up in our city streets.
