Crime-ridden Seattle marked the new year with a massive brawl as thick fog obscured the fireworks over the city’s iconic Space Needle.
Video shared online showed two men getting into a confrontation at the center of KOMO Plaza Wednesday night, when a man in a red shirt started hitting the other man.
At that point, a third man could be seen coming into the frame from the right, and punches the man in red.
Soon, four or five others became involved, all apparently trying to attack the man in the red shirt.
But he fought back, pushing one man out of the way and punching the assailant who originally hit him, tackling him to the ground.
Others could then be seen fighting amongst themselves, while a group of men try to gang up on the man in the red shirt.
It is unclear how the brawl ended, but it reportedly involved more than 15 people, according to Seattle Submissions.
The fight came as a thick, low hanging fog obscured views of a drone performance over the Space Needle.
A massive brawl broke out amongst New Years Eve revelers in Seattle’s KOMO Plaza Wednesday night
The brawl reportedly involved more than 15 people
The event featured an 18-minute long drone performance that illuminated the Seattle skyline, with multiple 10-minute pre-shows leading up to midnight.
‘It’s a pretty nice show, except that with this fog, we’re not going to be able to see much,’ one spectator told KOMO.
Seattle police told the Daily Mail they were unaware of any police reports filed about the incident.
But it came amid an uptick in serious crimes in the city.
According to crime statistics tracker Neighborhood Scout, Seattle residents have a shocking one in 129 chance of being a victim of a violent crime.
The robbery rate is over triple the national average at 2.22 cases for every 1,000 residents, and there are an average of 444 crimes per square mile in the city.
The city has also become known as a homelessness hotspot across the nation, and its unhoused population has surged by a staggering 88 percent in the past 10 years.
It has even seen a number of head-turning incidents over the past few months, with a robber biting off an 88-year-old woman’s finger during an attack on the porch her Seattle home in November.
The suspect, described as a man in his 30s, targeted the elderly woman as she cleaned household items on her back porch in the the Rainier Beach neighborhood on October 13, according to the Seattle Police Department.
It came as a thick, low hanging fog obscured views of a drone performance over the city’s iconic Space Needle
Spectators said they would not be able to see much of the drone show due to the heavy fog
The assailant approached the woman and demanded she turn over her belongings.
When she refused, the suspect began assaulting her and dragged her into the garage to continue the attack, biting off her finger as he stole her jewelry, police said.
When police arrived, the woman told officers that she feared for her life during the vicious assault.
She was taken to Harborview Medical Center with ‘serious’ head injuries, while the suspect remained on the loose.
Yet newly-elected mayor Katie Wilson has argued that the city needs more medical professionals and skilled social workers rather than cops.
‘Right now, police response times are unacceptable, and I do think that in the short term, we need to hire more officers,’ she told PubliCola in March.
‘I also think we need to greatly expand our unarmed response systems.’
