Gig Harbor road rage ended with driver, passenger and a bystander throwing punches, report says
Editor’s note: This blotter is compiled from recent Gig Harbor police reports.
He was doing a ‘different workout’ and got kicked out of his YMCA class
The morning of Sept. 10, an officer responded to the YMCA at 10550 Harbor Hill Dr. about a person who had a conflict with staff.
The man was pacing near his vehicle in the parking lot when the officer arrived and seemed upset.
“He told me he was doing a different workout than the one that was being taught and they told him to leave,” the officer wrote in the report.
The man cursed at the staff as he left. Staff said he also hit a sign on the way out. The man told the officer he ran into the sign, but didn’t mean to hit it.
Officers ordered the man officially trespassed at the request of YMCA staff.
He “was cooperative and left on foot as his vehicle was disabled,” the report says. Arrangements were made for his brother to come get the vehicle that night.
Fistfight in a parking lot follows roadway dispute
An officer responded to a parking lot at 11330 51st Avenue on Sept. 20 after a report of a fight.
When he arrived, there was a large crowd, but no active disturbance. The officer collected names and contact information from witnesses and alleged victims and got an account of what happened.
The first potential victim, a 66-year-old woman, told the officer her account.
She was delivering packages in a nearby neighborhood when a vehicle suddenly pulled up to the passenger side of her van. She hadn’t seen any oncoming traffic while backing her long van out of the small, dead-end side street she was on. She turned right on Borgen Boulevard, and the other vehicle sped past in the next lane over.
She then drove to the parking lot to deliver a package to a salon. The vehicle she saw earlier entered the parking lot from a different entrance and pulled up face-to-face with her van. The other driver, a 44-year-old man, got out and approached her window.
The woman’s granddaughter, 24, was also in the van. She got out of the passenger side and confronted the driver to protect her grandmother. He allegedly started to attack the 24-year-old woman and the grandmother got out to try and intervene. The van wasn’t in park and rolled into the other vehicle, causing minor damage. This made the man more angry and he allegedly kept punching the 24-year-old woman in the stomach. During the fighting, the 66-year-old woman was knocked to the ground and hit her head.
A witness who also got involved, a 78-year-old man, gave a written statement of his account.
He said the 44-year-old man’s wife was verbally involved in the conflict and that there was a young child in the back of their car that was “uncontrollably crying.”
The 78-year-old pulled the man throwing punches off of the 24-year-old, and decided to take pictures of the scene for documentation. He took pictures of the car’s license plate and the 44-year-old’s wife and was about to take a picture of the 44-year-old himself when the 44-year-old allegedly charged him and tried to hit him, failing to land any serious blows.
The 78-year-old got in a few punches and others helped pull the 44-year-old away. Then the 44-year-old approached the 78-year-old again and seized his hat, wadded it up and threw it.
“At some time during the process, he started throwing punches towards the young lady again and I attempted to get him in a headlock from behind, but someone (probably his wife) pulled me off,” the witness wrote in the statement. “At that point we were all separated and as we were attending to the elderly lady, the perpetrator took off.”
Police tracked the 44-year-old’s residence from his license plate, but he wasn’t home when they showed up later that day. Later that evening, one of his family members told the police department they could help with having the man come in.
The 44-year-old and his wife, age 42, showed up at the police department the next day. His wife gave police her account.
The van was backing up and nearly hit their car while they were driving on Pacific Avenue. The van turned wide on Borgen Boulevard and almost struck another vehicle. The 66-year-old woman allegedly “flipped the bird which made her husband upset.”
They later confronted the 66-year-old in the parking lot and he got out of his car to let the woman know that she almost hit their car.
The 24-year-old woman got out of the van and said she was videotaping the scene. That made the man frustrated, and he tried to protect his wife, who had gotten out of the car to intervene, and take away the phone. The 24-year-old woman allegedly started throwing punches and the fight ensued. Then the 78-year-old passerby got involved. In the midst of trying to separate them, the 66-year-old woman fell to the ground, but that was no one’s intention, according to the 42-year-old woman.
The 78-year-old began recording her husband, which made him upset and he tried to take the 78-year-old’s phone before they began fighting. The couple and their son then left the scene.
The officer issued a criminal citation instead of a jail booking because of a staffing shortage during his shift, he wrote in the report. The 44-year-old was cited on suspicion of three counts of fourth-degree assault and given a court date.
Dog bite on Soundview Drive
An officer responded to an animal bite call on Soundview Drive on Sept. 11.
The caller said a neighbor’s dog escaped, came into his backyard and bit his dog, an Airedale Terrier, the prior afternoon. The neighbor’s dog is aggressive toward people, he told the officer. He wasn’t sure which house the aggressive dog came from.
The caller said he saw blood and would check for wounds on his dog later. No one in his family got bit, he told the officer. He just wanted some kind of documentation of the incident.
The officer gave the caller a business card with the case number of the report.
