Atlanta police are investigating a fight that broke out at a bar, leaving several people injured and landing one woman in the hospital.
According to WSB-TV, the brawl broke out at the Ideal Sports Bar in southeast Atlanta.
Witnesses told the outlet that the melee erupted between several people after an exchange of politically charged statements and racist insults.
In the moments before the fight, multiple band members at the bar reportedly started making political statements about white people, which prompted a man to start heckling and intimidating them. Once that man hurled the N-word at Black band members, the verbal altercation escalated into physical violence.
“I think they wanted to kill. They didn’t want to fight,” one band member said.
“Once the N-word was thrown out, I knew it was going to be pretty bad,” another band member stated.
A video shows the brawl in full force, with several people shoving and punching each other on a pool table. At one point, a man is seen hitting a woman with a pool stick.
“I didn’t expect it to get as serious as it did. I didn’t expect that much violence,” one band member said.
Another witness said that the woman who was hospitalized after the fight “had to get eight stitches in the back of her head.”
A bar manager said that the bar doesn’t invite discriminatory behavior and treatment and that this fight was an isolated instance.
“We’re not like that. You come on Thursday night and there’s a ton of different color people there,” the bar manager remarked. “But because there was one racial, allegedly slur, then they take it to a whole new level.”
Bar owners have banned all the people who were involved in the fight.
They wrote on the bar’s Facebook page, which appears to have been deactivated for the time being, that the establishment has “never tolerated a space for bigotry, white supremacy or violence.”
No charges have been filed yet, but the band members stated they want the man believed to have incited the fight found and arrested.
