UW Protest Turns Chaotic: 1 Man Shot Amid Fights and Vandalism

SEATTLE, WA - A protest at the University of Washington on Friday night aimed at shutting down an event involving Breitbart.com pundit Milo Yiannopoulos turned chaotic as anarchists and protesters fought with attendees, and a 32-year-old protester was shot in the abdomen.

The shooting happened around 8:30 p.m. in front of Kane Hall, where Yiannopoulos was inside giving a talk. Immediately after the shooting, police could be seen treating the man, who was then taken from the scene and transported to Harborview Medical Center. Police said he was in surgery on Friday night.

After the shooting, University of Washington police released a description of a person of interest. But near midnight, a man turned himself in to UW police for questioning related to the incident.

Despite the shooting and other minor scuffles, University of Washington police Maj. Steve Rittereiser told Patch.com that there were no arrests. Seattle police also made no arrests related to protests on Friday.

The Yiannopoulos event was supposed to kick off at 7 p.m. inside Kane Hall. Around 6 p.m., people were lined up in front of the building waiting to go inside. A large group of protesters dressed in black wearing masks entered the area and began chanting and moving to block attendees. Their goal was to shut down the event.

Shortly after, Seattle and UW police moved into position in front of Kane Hall, blocking both protesters and ticket-holders from gaining access. Rittereiser said that the event went on as planned inside Kane Hall, and he believed that all ticket-holders were granted access.

As the night went on, protesters and Yiannopoulos fans interacted - sometimes angrily. There were vessels full of blue paint thrown around, and it appeared that a Yiannopoulos supporter deployed pepper spray against a protester. Some protesters removed bricks from Red Square, potentially to use as weapons.

There were also active discussions between protesters and attendees. The two sides could be heard talking about topics ranging from transgender rights to the merits of market capitalism.

At one point, protesters got into a scuffle with a man trying to attend the Yiannopoulos event. The man fell on the stairs on front of Kane Hall and was lying on the ground as protesters crowded around him. The protesters called out for police, who responded and dragged the injured man away.

For much of the night, police kept a tight line in front of Kane Hall. At times, the police pushed the crowd back toward Red Square, away from the main entrance. Some police stood ready with batons and pepper spray, but no police deployed weapons in front of Kane Hall.

Around the side of Kane Hall, toward Spokane Lane, some protesters were sprayed by pepper spray, which witnesses said was deployed by police.

Near 8 p.m., a large crowd of protesters filed into Red Square. They had walked to the campus from Westlake Park in downtown Seattle. With the addition of potentially hundreds more protesters, many of the Yiannopoulos fans who were waiting around began to leave. By 10 p.m., about half the number of protesters were left in Red Square, and the protest appeared to be dying down.

Stewart Brown, a Seattle resident, had marched with the protest that came from Westlake. Brown said that the protesters were stopped at Broadway and Pike Street on Capitol Hill holding a die-in to protest nuclear weapons. Suddenly, word spread through the crowd that racists were gathered at the UW. Brown said the protesters quickly regrouped and marched to campus - an almost 4 mile walk.

"Our crowd wanted to create a wall of meat" - a reference to a phrase pro-Trump motorcyclists use - "around this," Brown said.

Brown reported that the march from Capitol Hill was peaceful, and he didn't expect to encounter anti-fascist anarchists at UW.

Standing nearby watching - and wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat - was Todd Cadwell, who traveled from Bellingham for the Yiannopoulos event. He observed that the tensions between two sides of the political spectrum in the U.S. were clashing on the UW campus.

"It's time we stopped demonizing the other guy," he said, insinuating that the two sides could get together peacefully.

Images via Patch.com