No arrests yet in fights outside Circle K
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on August 8, 2017 5:50 AM
An investigation into a massive fight at a local gas station that sent a teenager to the hospital early Saturday morning is just getting underway, Goldsboro police said Monday.
Maj. Anthony Carmon, head of the Goldsboro Police Department's Investigative Services Bureau, said nobody had yet been charged as a result of the fight.
A 17-year-old told police he was jumped by about 10 other men, all in their 20s, at the Circle K gas station at 2101 Wayne Memorial Drive around 2:30 a.m. Saturday.
The teenager was taken to the hospital with injuries and is expected to recover, Carmon said.
Nobody else reported being injured.
A gas station clerk called the Wayne County Communications Center at about 2:34 a.m. to report a "big group of people fighting." Several officers were on scene within four minutes.
Police arrived to find around 150 people in the parking lot. Multiple fights were going on.
People continued to call 911 about the fight, reporting up to three fights going on -- two in the parking lot and a third near the intersection.
By 2:42 a.m., 12 officers were at the gas station.
A Facebook Live video of the incident was broadcast as the fights unfolded.
The video had been viewed more than 240,000 times, shared almost 2,000 times and had more than 100 comments as of Monday afternoon.
Carmon said police are aware of the video and are using it to aid the investigation.
"We're still looking at it," Carmon said.
The report said the teenager told police he was at Morgan's nightclub on East Ash Street before the fight and had danced with the girlfriend of one of the suspects, pinpointing that as the cause of the fight.
Carmon said investigators were not yet sure if that was true, and were looking into that claim.
Police did confirm the initial investigation leads them to believe many of the people involved had gone out that evening, and went to Circle K before heading home.
The person who shot the Facebook Live video that captured the fight was recording a large group of people in front of the gas station for about two minutes before people began fighting.
The video shows one fight breaking out at the front door of the gas station before capturing another in-between a car and a gas pump.
Multiple people are seen hitting one person near the car, before the person goes to the ground and a group of men continue to kick and beat him as he is lying on the ground.
Carmon said he could not say why the person was recording the video prior to the fights happening.
From here, Carmon said police will begin reaching out to the people involved in the incident.
"I don't think this particular (place) has a history of having problems, but we are working with the management of the establishment to see if there are ways we can prevent this kind of activity from happening again," Carmon said.