The eyes of the sports world, especially in Los Angeles and San Francisco, have been focused on the beating of Giants fan Bryan Stow at Dodger Stadium on April 1.
What has received far less notice was the beating of a pregnant woman and her brother, apparent Dodger fans, at Angel Stadium three nights earlier.
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Dennis Romero gets the scoop for our big sister news blog, LA Weekly's The Informer.
The incident occurred at the March 29 preseason Freeway Series game in Anaheim, which yours truly and photographer Christopher Victorio attended.
(Here is Chris' slideshow and my game post and follow-up).
A member of “The Dirty Army” reported on TheDirty.com about what he says he witnessed that night at the Big A:
After two groups of opposing fans clashed over which team is better, a guy wearing a Dodgers shirt was jumped by four Angels fans. The victim's seven-months pregnant sister jumped in to help him and was also roughed up.
The witness reports that the woman was kicked and pummeled while she was down and, like her brother, had to be hospitalized overnight.
The blog poster claims that the woman “started going into labor prematurely and the baby is
being given medication to help his lungs develop. His heart rate keeps
falling though and doctors are unsure about whether he's going to make
it.”
Romero, the LA Weekly news blogger, reports that Anaheim Police spokesman Sgt. Rick Martinez made the incident sound much less serious after being contacted.:
There was a fight between two groups of opposing fans. It
was a result of some comments made regarding one team and then the
victims said something worse about the opposing team, which escalated to
a physical confrontation.As a result, the male had a laceration under his eye with bruising. Both victims were treated released.
Martinez reported that the
victims gave police too little to go on in terms of physical descriptions to find the attackers.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.