"It looked to me like there was a riot going on," Martin says, "because people were running around, in the middle of the street, like they were getting away from somebody. It was quite a few people. When I saw people running down the middle of Jefferson Street, I started wondering what was going on."
At the time, Martin had no way of knowing that nearly 500 patrons of the nightclub Rain, two blocks away, had been expelled from the club minutes earlier.
Marcus Bruno, criminal justice administrator for Lafayette Consolidated Government, says that Rain was permitted to hold 299 patrons, but that 482 people were inside the building, and another 200 were waiting in line outside to get in the club. An administrator for the state fire marshal's office confirms that an anonymous complaint was filed against Rain for overcrowding, and the complaint was then turned over the Lafayette Fire Department, who shut the club down. Bruno says there were at least two fights that broke out after the club was emptied. Calls placed to Rain went unreturned as of press time.
Martin says that the crowd was coming from the direction of Rain and that he saw people wearing yellow bracelets with "Rain" written on them. Concerned about the situation, Renaissance owner Judd Kennedy and Martin closed the front doors of Renaissance. Kennedy announced over the PA system that the door was closing, but that if anyone needed to leave, they would be escorted outside by a Renaissance staff member. "We let people stay inside until the streets were pretty much clear, and the police had everything under control," Martin says.
All available police units were called downtown to help clear the area, but Lafayette Police Major Les Jones says that there wasn't anything unusual about this Saturday night. Seven officers usually patrol downtown on Saturday nights and an additional 35 to 40 officers work the night shift in Lafayette.
Keith Sonnier, owner of The Ballroom, two doors down from Renaissance, left his business just after 9 p.m. after hosting a wedding reception. "I don't stay downtown late at night because of the traffic jams," he says. "People aren't really stopping and parking, they're just riding. It's cluttered from one end of Jefferson Street to Evangeline Thruway. They're making conversations in the middle of the street. It can take 30 minutes to drive down the street, especially when people are stopping and talking in the middle of the road."
Sonnier says that since the beginning of April, he has noticed an increase of car traffic on weekend nights. "It's not gotten any better in the last two months," he says. Sonnier says he is concerned for his patrons' safety and has hired an additional security guard.
"That night there were several people out on the streets," Martin says. "A lot of them were not going into the clubs. For some reason, there's a new trend to hang around on the street, to bring your alcohol from home and just loiter along the walls of the businesses."
"Last weekend every high school in Acadiana graduated," says Lafayette Police Cpl. Mark Francis. "So we had a lot of high school graduates, and downtown is the popular hangout. There's the added attraction with the parks for everybody to come hang out, and there's people who are upset that don't want the loitering. But the way that downtown is designed, it offers that. I understand that businesses don't want to deal with it if they're not making money with it, but when there's so many people versus a few officers, it's difficult to move thousands of people."
"I've never seen anything this bad in downtown before," Martin says. "If it's serious enough that we're having to shut the doors down, there's a problem. I've always felt like something like this could happen because I've seen how everything's building up downtown. I've gone to the [City-Parish] council and expressed my concerns about it, and we've never really seen an influx of officers down here, as far as I'm concerned. Maybe there are, and I just don't see it."
Martin says that Renaissance has hired additional security, but that it still won't solve the problem on Jefferson Street. "I would like to see the council bring more officers downtown and do something about the loitering," he says. "That's the biggest problem I see down here. When you have people hanging around on the streets, that just opens people up to get into some trouble. A lot of these people are under age ' 16, 17 years old ' and they're not even supposed to be down there in the first place after 11 or 12 o'clock, but they're hanging around down there."
Francis says that Lafayette police are receiving loitering complaints from downtown business owners and residents, but that it's a catch-22 for downtown. "We're very much aware of the fact that there's a lot of people down there," he says, "but I'm also aware of that fact that downtown was revitalized to attract people down there. At one time there was nobody downtown, and people were crying to get them downtown. Now everybody's downtown, and they're crying, trying to get rid of them. It's amazing."
"When you have a small area with a high concentration of people," Jones says, "plus you add alcohol to it, you're going to have problems. It does present some challenges for the police department."
MAY 17 Here's a column from James Gill, this time in the Advocate. Gill, who has jumped ship from the Picayune, writes about the absurdity of dueling polls in this post. The numbers are so wildly different, it is obvious that both sides are "cooking the books," he writes. In particular, he looks at Sen. Mary Landrieu, and how her recent actions in DC have been received by those polled. Gill's acerbic, amusing prose is a welcome addition to a paper so conservative as to be occasionally lacking in personality.
MAY 17 Blogger Tom Aswell continues delivering bombshells about the state education department and Gov. Jindal's education "reform" efforts. In this post, he reports that students in the Shreveport area have been signed up for a charter school without their knowledge or consent. Most interesting to Aswell is how this Texas-based charter (with ties to GOP types) got the personal student information it has, if the students didn't give it.
MAY 17 This post by JR Ball in the Baton Rouge Business Report is an interesting tongue-in-cheek look at recent Baton Rouge economic development efforts. Among the items he examines is the idea that gaining a Costco makes BR a "world-class city." (Really? All you need is a different brand of Sam's? MK!) This effort, and other recent ones, are all built on the taxpayer's back, with tax zones, tax incentives and tax rebates, Ball writes.
MAY 17 Blogger CB Forgotston is critical of the legislature's reliance on a revenue-estimating committee's decision to include projected tax amnesty income in this year's forecast. That's a problem, CB posts, because the deadline for these people to pay their taxes is June 30, 2014. So when do you think these people who haven't paid taxes in years are going to pay their taxes? Surely not before June 30, and that means the money won't be there for this year's budget, he argues.
MAY 17 Here's an interesting blog out of California by a Hollywood writer, attorney and academic named Brian Alan Lane. He blogs about higher ed, and was a whistle-blower in a scandal over false credentials. In this post, he takes aim at LSU's new top dog, King Alexander. It's convoluted and a little confusing, but it sure makes Alexander a lot more interesting than he was yesterday.
MAY 17 Blogger Robert Mann writes about the LSU Board's refusal to allow Dr. Fred Cerise to testify before the legislature about Gov. Jindal's plan to close down all the state's charity hospitals and dump the poor on the private system. It's hard to imagine anyone more qualified than Cerise to testify about that, so why would anyone try to prevent him doing so? Mann thinks it is because the powers that be aren't interested in hearing any truth about the plan.
MAY 17 This post on the Louisiana Sinkhole Bugle, a blog that notes developments in the Bayou Corne and Jefferson Island salt domes, talks about a proposed expansion of the salt dome storage under Lake Peigneur in Iberia Parish. Residents are working against it for several reasons, including two biggies: the sinkhole disaster in Bayou Corne and the continuing, unexplained bubbling on the surface of the Lake.
MAY 17 NOLA police arrested more people Thursday accused of either being involved in the Mother's Day shooting or hiding the suspect afterward, this Gambit story reports. The NOLA police chief said he suspects the whole thing was gang-related and throws out a challenge to the gangs: he's got informants now, he says, and he knows a lot more than the gangs want him to know. The people who live in the neighborhoods terrorized by gangs are ready to talk, he says.
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