Thirty women in their early 20s came together in a planned showdown over one man and got into a massive brawl in South Los Angeles. According to the Los Angeles Times:

The fight began shortly after 2:30 p.m. at a Big Lots discount store parking lot, where witnesses saw women shouting at one another and fighting. The brawl then spilled onto the street and across Western to a nearby 76 gas station.[The confrontation] played out in front of 200 to 300 onlookers.

One of the women involved in the fight was eight months pregnant. According to witnesses, she was driven over by a car during the melee, dragged nearly 10 feet and then driven over again. The driver, who was part of the brawl and had been “screamin’ and threatenin’” later told police it was an “accident.”

Said LAPD Cmdr. Pat Gannon:

“We haven’t seen anything like this event before.”

According to at least one neighbor, it was well known that there would be a brawl on Monday and it was over a man.

Update: More information was released today about the melee. The victim is Shontae Treniece Blanche, 22. She is a part-time student at Cal State Northridge. Her friends and family described her as a good girl who would never look for this kind of trouble. She had reportedly said that she did not want to be like her parents who have been in and out of prison since she was a young child. That said, she is 22 years old and already expecting and her husband is in prison. The woman who killed her has been identified as Unique Kiana Bishop.

Unique is 21 and is on probation for a burglary conviction. She has been convicted twice of burglary and once of petty theft in the past two years. She maintains that ramming the crowd was an accident. Presumably yelling “I’m gonna git you” before hitting them was an accident too. Both Unique and Shontae were from South Central.

Activists were quick to argue this incident should not be used to judge the community. Of course this incident is a real life example of every imaginable stereotype about that community so it’s hard not to. Then again the intersection where the brawl occurred isn’t all that far from where Reginald Denny got the crap beaten out of him on national TV so I’ve long since passed judgment on the neighborhood.*

*Note: I’m very well aware that it was also members of that same neighborhood that risked their lives to pull Reginald away from the thugs intent on murdering him. I hope that they have been able to move to a better place to live. They deserve it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 9:53 am by Insider and is filed under Loons, California Schemin'. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.