Five people have been charged over a vicious beatdown on a Cincinnati street after footage of the wild brawl went viral.
The suspects’ names were not released, and Cincinnati Police Chief Teresa Theetge declined to specify the charges — but cautioned that more arrests were expected.
“We have five we have charged, and anticipate more,” Theetge told reporters Monday, two days after the 3 a.m. Saturday incident that she referred to as a “fight.”
A man and woman were beaten in a Cincinnati street on Saturday evening. XAccoding to online videos, the “fight” consisted of a mob stomping on the head of a man cowering on a downtown street, while a woman was cold-cocked and knocked out, with blood pouring from her mouth, after she tried to intervene.
Theetge, however, tried to downplay the brawl, calling the weekend “outside of this one incident, an amazing success for this city” while explaining that a baseball game and music festival happening in Cincinnati that night both went off without a hitch.
Police announced Monday that five people were charged over the violent incident. FOX 19
“We had one incident — one incident — late Friday night into Saturday morning that is getting all the attention and undoing the good stuff that happened this weekend,” she said.
There was also no update given on the condition of the targets of the assault — with Theetge saying she didn’t know if anyone was hospitalized afterward, but that the victims “appeared to be as well as could be expected” when police arrived.
But Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said he spoke to the woman who was knocked out, claiming she was a mother named Holly who told him “not a single local or state official had yet reached out” to her besides “one police detective.”
The woman was knocked unconscious during the melee on Saturday. X“She’s a single working mom who went to a friend’s birthday party,” the former GOP presidential hopeful said. “It’s unconscionable that there were no police present in that area of Cincinnati on a Friday night, or even an ambulance to take her to the hospital.”
Cincinnati Fraternal Order of Police president Ken Kober told WLWT the victims suffered “pretty serious injuries” and would be “recovering from this for a while.”
Theetge, however, disputed critics’ characterization of the downtown police presence, saying officers were on scene within six minutes of receiving a call about the brawl and that it had ended and dispersed by the time they arrived.
But she also appeared to blame residents of her city who saw the fight for any delay in response — saying upward of 100 people were either involved or watching, but that only a single person called 911.
The chief also admonished the press, accusing reporters of playing video of the incident that only showed “one version of what occurred” — though she did not elaborate on what she meant by that.
Exactly what sparked the fight remains unclear, but footage indicated it started as an argument between two men before quickly escalating.
The man taking the brunt of the attack was white, while his assailants appeared to be largely black.
One witness told WXIX somebody made a racial comment before the beating began, though those reports are unconfirmed and it is unclear who supposedly said what.
Footage of the brawl — which was extremely graphic, and included the man at its center being body-slammed at one point — spread rapidly online over the weekend, with Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk even weighing in and calling for arrests.
“I haven’t seen the full context, but what I saw is a mob of lawless thugs beating up on an innocent person,” the vice president and former Ohio senator said.
“Where I come from at least, when you have a grown man who sucker-punches a middle-aged woman, that person ought to go to jail for a very long time,” Vance added.
