Protestors in Bloomington surrounded a van that drove into the middle of a large crowd Monday night.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (WTHR) - Protestors in Bloomington surrounded a van that drove into the middle of a large crowd Monday night.

The Black Lives Matter demonstration started with speakers and a balloon release. Bloomington Police say it lasted about an hour.

But around 8:30 Monday night, the protest took a sudden turn. When demonstrators, who had been marching from the Sample Gates on the IU campus, reached Lincoln and 3rd Street, the mood turned.

"You can definitely tell that he intentionally accelerated toward the protesters," said Andrew Biller, an IU student and reporter for IU Student Television. He shot video of an SUV running into a crowd of demonstrators. Just before the incident, he heard the driver talking to some of the protesters.

A driver rammed protesters with his vehicle at a Black Lives Matter demonstration near the Bloomington Police Station.#BLM #Bloomington #IN pic.twitter.com/sHnYTtT1FY — Andrew Biller (@akbiller) October 11, 2016





"He was like, 'Listen, I support Black Lives Matter, I support you guys, I just want to get home, I just want to get through here'," said Biller. "Then, he laid on his horn for a solid few seconds and then just put his foot on the gas."

While some protestors told Eyewitness News the driver, 21-year-old IU student Ryan Davis, was trying to ram his 2003 Mercedes into the crowd, police say he was the victim of the demonstrators.

"He had been confronted by several (protesters) he had asked them to move and when they didn't do so, they began beating on his SUV and they broke the window and tore the side mirror off of his car," said Bloomington Police Capt. Steve Kellams.

Bloomington Police say it's not uncommon for protests to spill out into city streets and, while uniformed officers were not present, police say they were watching.

"We were monitoring the entire event," said Kellams. "There were traffic disruptions for about 30-45 minutes."

And despite this confrontation, police say no one was at risk.

"Our goal for that was to make sure that people were safe. And at no time during the event did we feel that it rose to a position to which someone's life was seriously in danger. If it had, we would have had to have made some different actions, and step in to keep everyone safe," said Kellams.

The protest was organized by Students Against State Violence, a student group at IU that is trying to build a movement against inequality.