Twenty-two students and town residents involved in Leroy’s Place fight
Ian Benson
Viewpoints Editor
A fight broke out early Sep. 15 at Leroy’s Place, a popular bar for both students and local residents. Six were left with minor injuries. The brawl, which included an estimated 22 people from both the College and the community, started after Thursday’s “Karaoke Night.” No arrests were made.
Reportedly, the fight was sparked by tensions between the students and the town residents at the bar, with both sides trading insults. These words eventually led to an altercation, which police broke up.
“If nobody wants to press charges, we usually just kick them loose,” Cpt. Scott Rotolo of the Wooster Police Dept. said. “Sometimes we get [to a fight,] and there may be a couple of minor altercations or arguments, but we more or less just make sure the situation hasn’t escalated.”
The incident seems to be another in the long history of strained relations between the town and the community. Last year, two fights occurred on campus between students and members of the community. In addition, a handful of students were hit on separate occasions with darts and rubber bullets from a blowgun.
Still, these events are not the norm for the larger community. “I don’t see many reports, if any, that come across my desk that describe any sort of animosity between College students and permanent residents of the city of Wooster,” Rotolo said. He felt that the majority of incidents between the two groups are confined to the shouting and altercations that occur on Beall Avenue.
Even then, in a case like this, Rotolo expressed that the motivating factors in these incidents were not simply that the two sides were made up of students and permanent residents of Wooster. “As far as Joe Schmo of Something Drive getting into an altercation with someone because he was a College student, or because the other person involved was a resident of Wooster? I haven’t seen anything like that,” Rotolo said.