UPDATE: Charges filed against teen suspects in weekend brawl

What began with a call for a single cop to quell an out-of-control birthday party at a St. Paul rec center ended with a brazen brawl involving hundreds of teens that stretched across entire city neighborhoods.

Police officials are saying that the Saturday night melee, which resulted in six arrests and may have been related to a person found brutally beaten at a downtown bus stop, was the worst of its kind this summer.

While officers are often called to break up fights, the size, scope and degree to which participants ignored officers’ commands forced police to pull numerous spare squads from every district in the city as fights broke out.

“Basically what we have is utter disregard for common decency. This whole event was sheer stupidity,” said St. Paul police spokesman Steve Linders.

The incidents began just after 10 p.m. Saturday, when an officer was called to a birthday party at Dunning Recreation Center, a midsize parks department facility adjacent to Central High School in St. Paul’s Summit-University neighborhood.

Police said an employee of St. Paul-based ARTS-Us, which has managed the center for years, “feared for his life,” as the private party grew increasingly rowdy — particularly after 9:30 p.m., when it was supposed to officially end. Pictures of the building’s interior after the party showed overturned tables and trash strewn about the building.

The lone ARTS-Us staff member working that night wrote in a report on the cause of the incident: “They didn’t follow rules. And was asked to leave. But they didn’t. There was activities going on that shouldn’t be going on.”

When asked to describe the “outcome of the incident,” the staff member wrote, “Fight. Being out of control. So I had to call the police. The parent left after I told her that I called police, found out that shots was fired outside.”

The staff member, when contacted at home, declined to comment.

The person who signed the rental agreement for the party with ARTS-Us — which had a $100 damage deposit — did not immediately return a call for comment Monday.

A police officer arrived to find a crowd of “between 100 and 200 teens” in Dunning’s parking lot and right away heard three shots.

As the officer called for backup, multiple fights broke out.

FIGHT SPREADS ALONG GREEN LINE

As more officers arrived on scene, Linders said partygoers largely ignored them and kept fighting.

The first person arrested — Roman Prescott Jr., 18, of St. Paul — was one part of the parking lot brawl, police said. When officers tried to detain him, others in the crowd grabbed him and tried pulling him out of their hands, forcing police to use pepper spray, Linders said.

Within minutes, another brawl started a few blocks away. And then reports poured in from multiple stops on the Green Line, along University Avenue, several blocks to the north.

One report at Victoria Street noted people ignoring police orders to stop “yelling, screaming, dancing, twerking and fighting” on the platform, according to one of the 20 police reports written about the incidents, which stretched from 10 p.m. to 12:30 a.m Sunday. Officers from the department’s gang and force units were tapped to bolster the city’s response.

The manager of a Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen near the Lexington Parkway stop was startled when a teenage girl banged on his door, begging to be let in. A police report noted that girls were fighting on the nearby light-rail platform.

Though the manager had just closed, he allowed the girl inside — only to have her threaten to throw a rock at him, police said. She’d asked to be let out, and the manager told her if he let her out he wouldn’t let her back in.

Officers responding to the scene used pepper spray to break up the fight, and one teen threw a rock at them, according to another report.

Police believe some groups took the Green Line into downtown St. Paul, as a congregation grew around the notoriously active Fifth and Minnesota streets bus stop, next to the light rail’s Central Station.

Just after midnight, Metro Transit police responded to a report of a man lying at the stop who had been brutally beaten. A transit agency spokesman said Monday that police didn’t see the assault and had made no arrests.

The 26-year-old, who is from Maplewood but was not named, was taken to Regions Hospital, where he was initially listed in critical condition. By Monday, police said, he had been upgraded to satisfactory.

Six teens were arrested, including Prescott and another 18-year-old, Taishawn Taqunn Smith, both on riot charges. The other four were age 13 to 17; police withheld their identities because they are minors. They also face rioting and other charges, including fleeing police and disorderly conduct.

Two of them — a 13-year-old and a 17-year-old — also were charged with felony aggravated assault. Police noted the 17-year-old was arrested downtown as a felon in possession of a .22-caliber handgun — the same caliber of three shell casings found later that morning in Dunning’s parking lot. Police are testing to see if the casings match the gun.

REC CENTER INQUIRY

At City Hall, parks and recreation department spokesman Brad Meyer said the city would check with ARTS-Us to make sure rules or protocols for the facility had been followed.

“I will be meeting with Arts-Us on Thursday to review rental policies, parks rules and regulations, and ensuring that this type of event doesn’t repeat itself,” Andy Rodriguez, recreation program supervisor for the parks department, said in an email to staff Monday. “The meeting will include their executive director and a few members of the Board.”

Meyer said the parks department will rely on ARTS-Us’s own investigation of the incident, along with the police reports, to determine whether any policies were broken.

ARTS-Us — a St. Paul nonprofit founded in 1993 by three women, one of whom is Ramsey County Commissioner Toni Carter — did not respond to voice or email messages about the incident.

The agency has had a contract with the city to manage Dunning since 2008; it was one of the first agencies to partner with the city in this way. The agreement was renewed in 2015.

Meyer noted that alcohol is permitted on very few park properties — certainly not Dunning — and typically a 100-person party, particularly after hours, would have required more than one supervisory staff member.

ARTS-Us has no similar reported incidents in their file with the parks department.