A wedding at the Society Hill Sheraton in Philadelphia early Sunday morning ended in a huge brawl and tragedy, with one wedding guest suffering a fatal heart attack and three people arrested.
Max Schultz, visiting the city with his family for his 15th birthday caught the fight on his iPhone and uploaded it to YouTube, where it’s starting to go viral, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Police said the fight began when some of the guests went to the hotel bar and started fighting among themselves. People staying at the Sheraton who had been at another wedding at a different venue arrived at the bar and started fighting with the guests who were already fighting with each other.
Police Lt. Ray Ever said it’s not known what started either fight, except “there was an issue with a lot of alcohol fueling the fights.”
Police said they didn’t know if the 57-year-old guest who had the heart attack was in any of the fights, but said the dead man was the uncle of one of the brides.
The boy who filmed the altercations said he was in his room at about 2 a.m. when heard the party start to go bad.
It started to sound more like shouting than partying. I saw a million police officers and started taping.
It’s estimated that between 50-100 people were involved, and the cops called for “almost a citywide assist.”
Max and his mother estimated that they saw between 50 and 100 partygoers and as many police officers. “They were storming the hallways,” he said of the cops. “They came up the elevator looking for people.”
Evers didn’t know how many guests or police were there, but he said that cops called for a third assist, “which is almost a citywide assist.”
In the video, the boy can be heard asking, “Did they just deck the bride?” and then stating: “They just decked the bride.”
But Evers said there was no indication that cops hit the bride, and the boy admitted that police may have pushed her to the ground.
It looked necessary because these people were obviously ramped up on stuff. The people were fighting back. It was a mess.