Dewey seeks to talk it out after bar fight

After a fight outside of a bar in downtown Dewey Beach required several police departments to respond, Mayor Diane Hanson’s question to Police Chief Samuel Mackert was simple.

“Is there anything you need from (council) ... to do your job, you feel, moving forward based on this experience?” she said.

After an hour-long meeting, council found their legislative powers can only do so much to address the town’s concerns.

In a meeting that saw animosity toward the business owners in question, the chief painted the scene that happened in the area of the Ivy and Northbeach restaurants in downtown Dewey on July 25.

First, Dewey police responded to a call of a large fight inside Ivy. A responding officer heard “loud screaming” and “a female screaming for help” before he saw the fight happening in the restaurant.

More Dewey officers then showed up to assist and arrest one man involved in the tussle.

“While the officers were placing him into custody, the crowd ... began to move and surround them,” he continued. “The individual was contained, but the officers became surrounded.”

Those inside the restaurant “attempted to separate” the man being arrested from the responding officers, he said.

As the crowd and police moved into the parking lot, it continued to escalate, according to Mackert.

Pepper spray was deployed. More assistance was needed to calm the crowd. Delaware State Police, Rehoboth Beach and Lewes were among the numerous agencies needed to quell the bout.

Mackert said there were shouts from the crowd they would be back the following Saturday as well.

It was reminiscent of a similar scene 30 years ago, when a Memorial Day weekend fight in 1985 caused drinking to be banned that fall and the town to ponder a new slogan in its aftermath.

The public hearing on Thursday was held to hear from the public on how to best solve the issue. Town officials cited poor lighting, the decorum of the restaurant’s security and the size of their police force as potential factors leading to the brawl.

So when an attorney representing the restaurants in question showed up in the place of the owners, council was audibly upset.

“What we’re hoping to do is have a conversation with (the business owners) and they aren’t here,” councilman David Jasinski said. “The management team you represent, they should know what to do to make sure this doesn’t happen anymore. We just can’t be having stuff like this go along.”

He was speaking to Steve Spence, an attorney who represents a number of businesses along the Route 1 corridor where both Ivy and Northbeach are situated.

Spence would not go into many of the details of the fight, saying potential civil or criminal litigation limited his ability to speak on the matter.

He did say “additional security staff was hired” and the lighting was being addressed. Delaware’s Department of Transportation lent the town several lighting fixtures to illuminate the road, according to Chief Mackert, and Spence said more were on their way or already installed.

But as to what led to the fight, Spence said a public forum is not the place for discussion considering the legal ramifications of what happened.

“Talking about it in public makes no sense for anybody whatsoever,” Spence said. “People will hire lawyers that will say we made omissions as to what happened.”

So council was left to their own devices on how to respond.

First, the proposition of sending a letter to the state to describe the situation in hopes that it could garner a response and potentially more aid. Councilman Gary Mauler said more funding or more assistance from state agencies during the summer could help prevent another similar event from happening.

“We do not have the resources ... to sustain the level of police force that we’ve been fortunate enough to get for free,” councilman Gary Mauler said. “I think the state needs to be aware they may need to help financially in the future.”

But it was shot down, with other members of council saying a face-to-face conversation with state representatives may better solve the problem.

Then, the idea of creating a standard for the number of security guards as well as their training regiments at local restaurants. But the idea of making a town-wide mandate on security guards at restaurants seemed like an overreach, so it was only a brief discussion.

Eventually, Mayor Henson stated the town wasn’t in a position where it could address the problem in a substantive way at a special meeting two weeks after the incident.

“As a town, unfortunately, we are extremely limited with what we can and cannot do, because we have to treat all establishments the same,” Henson said. “What we can control is the lighting.”

So Friday’s meeting boiled down to that one issue. How to, literally, illuminate the problem.

But with the prospect of the business adding their own lighting within a week, council agreed to wait until the following week’s meeting to see if the businesses did an adequate job.

By the end, there was an uneasy tension after no official action was taken other than to re-examine the newly installed lights in a week.

“I don’t get it,” Mauler said, adding that in his three years on council “I haven’t heard of anything like this at the other establishments.”

“We’re at a point here from what I heard ... we were really close to either sending someone to the hospital or sending someone to the morgue,” he said.

Halfway through one of the busiest periods for tourism during the summer, one that’s showing another potentially strong year of growth for Delaware’s coastal towns, Mayor Henson knew the implications of losing the resort town’s reputation of a tourist attraction meant for all ages.

“It’s unfortunate, because we were having such a nice, peaceful summer,” she said.

Contact Phil Davis at 410-877-4221 or pdavis3@dmg.gannett.com.