Three Alabama men are facing misdemeanor assault charges after a group of white men attacked a Black dockworker on Saturday during a brawl involving multiple people along the Montgomery Riverfront.
Montgomery Police Chief Darryl J. Albert announced assault charges against Richard Roberts, 48; Allen Todd, 23; and Zachery Shipman, 25. At a news conference Tuesday, Albert said one of the men is in custody and the other two other were expected to turn themselves in to police Tuesday afternoon.
Police are expected to bring more charges in the brawl.
“We were unable to present any inciting a riot or racially biased charges at this time,” Albert told reporters.
When asked if the situation constituted a hate crime, Albert added “Based on the elements of this crime, those elements did not exist.”
Albert said police are also looking to speak with Reggie Gray, 42, a Black man shown in social media videos wielding a folding chair in the brawl.
Albert confirmed witness accounts of the incident: that a group of white private boaters attacked a Black dockworker, Damien Pickett, as he attempted to move their pontoon to make way for the Harriott II Riverboat. The more than 200 passengers on the riverboat waited for at least 30 minutes as its captain and Pickett tried to get the group of rowdy boaters to move their watercraft. Several members of the private pontoon then attacked Pickett, Albert said.
“They just didn’t think the rules applied to them. It was so avoidable. This never had to have happened,” a witness, Leslie Mawhorter, 52, who was aboard the Harriott II, previously told NBC News. “I knew something was going to go down, because their attitude was just, ‘You can’t tell us what to do.’ They were going to be confrontational regardless of who you were.”
The riverboat captain called police around 7 p.m. local time and officers arrived at the scene at 7:18 p.m., Albert said. Thirteen people were detained, questioned, then released, the police chief said,…
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