Men doused with pepper spray in scuffle with Myrtle Beach security guards
Myrtle Beach SC Oct 17 2017
Two men were pepper sprayed when they got into a scuffle with security who asked them to leave a club at Broadway at the Beach Sunday, but exactly how the scuffle started remains a mystery.
The men said security attacked them first. Security said they sprayed the men because they were charging them. Surveillance footage told a different story, before the camera recording it turned away.
Myrtle Beach police were dispatched to an assault in the Broadway at the Beach parking lot around 1:30 a.m. Three men were in handcuffs when officers arrived, according to a police report.
A man in one of the handcuffs told police he walked outside of the club to smoke a cigarette, but when he tried to re-enter through the back door, a security guard wouldn’t let him enter. The security guard told him he needed to leave, the man said, so he grabbed his friends and they started to walk to their vehicle.
He said they were asking security guards why they were being told to leave as the guards escorted them to their car. Then, one of the guards put hands on his friend, who pushed back, he told police.
“That’s when the security guard took out his pepper spray” and sprayed his friend, the man said. His other friend “tried to push the security guard away” and was also sprayed, according to the report. The man, who talked to police, said he got in his car as the scuffle happened, but security ordered him out of the car to detain him.
The security guards had a different story to tell.
Broadway security told police they were escorting the men off of their property and as the men were getting into their car and arguing with the guards, two of the men got out of the car and “walked towards them.”
“That’s when security stated they pepper sprayed (the men)… and tried to put them into handcuffs” as one of the men punched a guard, police noted in the report.
Surveillance footage started to reveal a different account, before the camera panned away.
The footage showed the men “walking away from Broadway security” and then guards trying to grab the men as they walked to their vehicle, according to the report. “It shows a small pushing match then shows the one security guard pepper spray” one of the men.
“At the moment of the spray, the camera then turns the other way and zooms in on a vehicle showing nothing,” police noted in the report. It later zooms back out and pans over to show the men being handcuffed.
“Due to the conflicting stories and the lack of video surveillance no charges were filed” and the men were released, the report stated.
Four months earlier, in June, Myrtle Beach police were called to Broadway at the Beach after security guards say they were forced to use pepper spray on an unruly crowd.
Surveillance footage of that incident showed a group walking toward the parking lot when a couple of people inside the crowd started to fight and then stopped, according to the June report. The fight had ended when security surrounded the crowd and started spraying, police said.
Myrtle Beach Sun News
