Christmas Eve fight broke out in Crossgates Mall
GUILDERLAND — All was not calm, all was not bright.
A video of a brawl at Crossgates Mall on Christmas Eve has gone viral.
The fight started on Tuesday at about 4 p.m., close to the mall’s early holiday closing time of 5 p.m.
The video shows a group of between five to 10 young men fighting in the Beef Jerky Outlet. As of Friday, the video had 3 million views.
The fight started outside the store, in the open corridor with a smaller group, and the numbers grew after the fight spilled into the store and heated up, with participants apparently oblivious to the damage they were causing.
Employees stood by, apparently unable to do anything, as participants threw punches, dragged one another across a table of merchandise — which was then flipped over — and crashed against the walls where products were hanging on display.
Captain Daniel McNally of the Guilderland Police — who is set to become chief in mid-January — said Friday that there was one minor injury. He declined to say whether the injured person was involved in the fight, but said the person was not an employee.
The Guilderland Police are working, McNally said, on identifying potential suspects. No arrests have been made yet, and Guilderland was the only responding agency, he said.
The video, shot from outside the store, was originally posted to Twitter by someone with the handle “Glock Rivers,” who gave The Enterprise permission to use his video of the brawl.
The incident “appears to be an isolated incident and I don’t believe that violence is increasing at the mall,” said McNally.
In August 2019, two Guilderland officers suffered minor injuries when they tried to break up a fight between several females at Get Air Trampoline Park. The officers were then “assaulted by multiple subjects,” a press release from the police said at the time, and two juvenile males were arrested and charged with second-degree assault, a felony, and with resisting arrest and criminal trespass, both misdemeanors.
Curtis Cox, the spokesman and deputy chief of the Guilderland Police, told The Enterprise a year ago that disruptive groups of shoplifters are a new trend in crimes at the mall. In these incidents, he said, a group causes a disruption in one part of the store — yelling and screaming, for instance, or throwing racks of clothes on the floor — while someone else commits a larceny elsewhere in the store.
In November 2016, a gun was fired in Crossgates Mall, causing panicked shoppers to flee and resulting in a lockdown while police searched the premises. One young man was acquitted of several charges including possessing a firearm, in the incident, but convicted of reckless endangerment. The prosecution in the case said the shooting was gang-related.