A viral video showing a group of white men beating a Black customer at a Fort Wayne, Indiana, bar sparked considerable outrage and a quick rationalization from the establishment’s owner.
“There are two sides to every story,” Pike’s Pub owner Kelly Rost, who was not present when the fight occurred last Friday night, said the melee originated after the Black man refused to pay his tab.
But a witness to the fight, who knows the victim, said Rost is dead wrong.
“The bartender told him he could have another drink,” the witness told WANE-TV in Fort Wayne. “The owner’s boyfriend told him he was cut off. And the owner’s boyfriend was way more drunk than he was.”
Rost’s boyfriend appeared to be on a power trip when he kicked the Black man, a regular customer, out of the bar, said the witness, who was granted anonymity for fear of retaliation against him and his family from the Outlaws Motorcycle Club, who frequent the bar. Many of the participants in the fight wore vests with the name “Outlaws” imprinted on them, and at least one person can be heard shouting racial epithets at the victim.
“He planned on paying,” the witness said. “He wasn’t trying to leave without paying. It was never about paying the tab, because he always pays his tab.”
The Allen County Sheriff’s Department, meanwhile, just assigned a detective to the case, a public information officer told WANE on Monday.
“It is very early in the investigation, and he is still getting the case together,” the spokesperson said when asked if federal authorities might be called in to assist in the probe of what many believe was a racially motivated hate crime.
That includes the witness who spoke to the reporter.
“I want everybody to not have to feel like they’re walking on eggshells when they go into any of the bars,” he said. “Whether they’re white, whether they’re black, whether they’re Mexican, Latino, Dominican; everybody should be entitled to go into any bar.”
The unidentified victim was about to leave the establishment when he was confronted by the bikers, the witness recalled.
“Three or more other of them walk in before (the victim) even got to reply,” the witness said. “They were telling him that he needed to leave. He went to leave. And that’s when the (owner’s boyfriend) grabbed his arm and said you’re going to pay your tab (expletive). And that’s when the Outlaws tightened up and squeezed around him.”
The witness said one of the bikers threw the first punch, hitting the victim in the face. That prompted others to join the attack, outnumbering the victim 8 to 1. He had been kicked and punched repeatedly by the time police were called, according to the witness.
The fight had ended when Allen County deputies, dispatched “to have an intoxicated subject removed from the bar,” arrived. The victim, who declined to identify his attackers, was taken to a local hospital in fair condition.
The Outlaws are affiliated with an Illinois motorcycle club whose roots trace back to 1935, according to WANE. It now has more than 1,700 members across 176 chapters worldwide, states the U.S. Department of Justice, which classifies the club as an “outlaw motorcycle gang” that uses its club as a “conduit for criminal enterprises, ” including weapons and drug trafficking.
The station reports that the Fort Wayne chapter has been the subject of multiple investigations and FBI raids over the past 13 years.
A petition urging for an “investigation & enforcement action regarding assault at Pikes Pub” has collected nearly 6,000 signatures on change.org.
Community activist Roderick Parker said besides “at least four or five arrests” he’d like to see a revocation of bar’s liquor license “if not a closing down of a business.”
“All you have to do is listen for the hard ‘R’s’ in the background. All you have to do is listen to the chant of ‘beat him, beat him,” Parker said. “For me, it’s a hate crime.”
