CINCINNATI — Body camera footage released by the Cincinnati Police Department shows the moment an officer arrived at the intersection of 4th and Elm streets following a violent fight in downtown Cincinnati that has since garnered national attention.
Video shows an officer arriving after being briefed by another officer. As he walks up to them, he immediately asks the group consisting of five men and one woman, who is not the woman now identified as Holly, if they need the fire department called for their injuries. All of them say no before one man begins telling the officer that he was attacked and lost his glasses.
"These aren't my glasses," he said, holding up a different pair of glasses. "My glasses are somewhere here. They attacked me — I was attacked by multiple people. I can't find my glasses, I can't see."
You can watch the full body camera footage below *WARNING: This video may include some explicit language*:
When the officer asked what led to the fight, the man, who appeared drunk, said he did not know, but said it happened after they left a nearby bar.
"It's a local guy, from my understanding, and a bunch of guys got involved, and I got side punched. It was not a fair fight," the man said.
The officer asks the man if he wants to file a report.
"I don't want the report," he tells the officer.
"Assault?" the officer asks.
"Yeah, but I don't know who it was," he replies.
"We can try to figure it out," the officer says.
"I don't know who it was," the man says. "I just want my glasses back. I can't find them."
As the man walks to the sidewalk, body camera footage shows a woman, now identified as Holly, standing in front of the officer while looking at her phone. Holly does not speak.
The officer asks the other men in the group if they want to file a police report, and they say they don't, saying, "f—k the report" and telling the officer to watch surveillance footage to see what happened. The officer responds by saying, "If I don't have the report, I can't watch the video."
Holly then walks away from the officer, towards the sidewalk. She does not speak to the officer again and walks away from the immediate area.
Finally, the man who initially spoke to the officer about the fight says he will file a report.
"Oh my god," the man says as he searches for his ID to give to the officer. "My girl's wanting to go home right now."
The man reiterates that he cannot see because his glasses are missing, "and that's very expensive." He also says he got hit "pretty hard."
Then, he begins to tell the officer what happened.
"They were going after other people, and I tried to protect my girls, and there was one guy that just went nuts and then all of a sudden, there was other people that hit me from (my) blindside," the man says. "And I'm an old man. I'm 62. I lost my glasses. I don't know where they're at, so I couldn't see. I can't see at all."
"You saw a fight going on and tried to separate it, and then got struck?" the officer asks.
"Yes, sir ... no initiation by me," the man says.
The officer once again asks the man if he wants to call the fire department, to which he says no.
Another man, whose shirt appears to be torn, then provides more details to the officer. He says the group was waiting for their rideshare when everything broke out.
"All we did was try to get people off each other," he says. "Every time we'd get people off each other and say stop, they'd come at us more. There was a whole mob — 30, 35, f—king 40 people."
He also shows the officer pictures he took of the people involved on his phone. The officer gives him a link to send them to so he can include them in the report.
While the officer speaks to the man with the torn shirt, the man he originally spoke with leaves, hugging the other men before getting into a car.
The man with the torn shirt also questioned the bar's staff, who he said did not come out and help during the fight.
"We were right here standing, waiting for a f—king Lyft and these guys want to start s—t with a 62-year-old man. ... It's bulls—t," the man says.
"I understand the frustration with that, but I can't make them be decent people," the officer responds.
Video obtained by WCPO 9 News last week shows the man in the torn shirt yelling "he's 62 years old" at a group after the fight ended. At that time, he was trying to stop someone from squaring up with the man the officer initially spoke to. In that video, the man officer initially spoke to was seen on video repeatedly saying a racial slur at someone after he was thrown to the ground and kicked.
As people tried to separate the man and another person, the man tells those separating them to, "Hit him, hit that little n—r." He then walks up to one of the men separating them and says, "I didn't do it. I was on the ground. This b—h hit me."
You can watch that video here:
The officer once again asks the group if they need EMS, and they all say they do not.
"The guy that got his a— kicked has three boys that are f—king policemen," the man with the torn shirt says.
"He got jumped," another man with blood on his shirt says.
"I understand that's what happened, I'm making a report for it," the officer says, asking if they have any other questions before walking to a loud argument happening nearby.
Since the fight, six people have been arrested and charged with two counts of aggravated rioting, three counts of assault and three counts of felonious assault. If they're convicted on all the charges they face now, each suspect could face up to around 29 years in prison.
