Man Arrested For Assaulting Trump Supporter Near UC Berkeley Campus
BERKELEY (CBS SF) – KPIX 5 reporter Anne Makovec captured the assault of a man wearing a suit and a "Make America Great Again" cap at the edge of the UC Berkeley campus late Thursday morning as tensions remained high in the wake of Wednesday night's violent protests.
The fight broke out at around 11:30 a.m. when the man wearing the suit and cap was walking near the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph was attacked. The assailant stopped his vehicle, a white SUV, in the middle of the intersection and jumped the man.
The attacker ripped the Trump hat off of the victim's head and began beating him along with at least one other person who came from the SUV.
Several bystanders intervened and attempted to stop the fight. The victim -- later identified in reports as 21-year-old UC Berkeley student Jack Palkovic -- was able to break free from the scrum and can be seen yelling at the assailants as they get back in their car.
The victim proceeded to yell expletives and make obscene gestures with both hands as the attackers drove away.
Two men who got out of the car to attack the Trump supporter were arrested after they tried to drive away from the incident.
Palkovic told an AP reporter that he is a member of the college Republicans and helped organize Wednesday's event with Milo Yiannopoulos, a polarizing editor of Breitbart News.
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The small drama that played out was just one sign of how tempers were continuing to flare the day after a violent protest that happened only a few hundred feet away from where the fight took place shut down the scheduled speaking engagement featuring Yiannopoulos.
A group of approximately 150 masked protesters were the main perpetrators of the violence during what started as peaceful protest against the controversial speaker. Those protesters, all dressed in black, began throwing bricks and lit fireworks at police the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union building hosting the event.
Eventually, the vandals lit a gas-powered portable floodlight on fire and used police barriers to break the glass windows to the campus books store that takes up the first floor of the student union building.
At about 6:20 p.m., UC campus police announced that the event had been cancelled. Officers ordered the crowd to disperse, calling it an unlawful assembly.
While protesters eventually left the area to march in the streets of Berkeley, the violence wasn't over.
By 8 p.m., a large crowd of people had moved off the campus and onto Telegraph Avenue. They smashed ATMs at a Bank of America branch and set several trash fires on Telegraph Avenue.
After marching west on Durant Avenue, the group moved north on Shattuck Avenue, smashing windows and vandalizing a Mechanics Bank branch near the corner of Bancroft Way.
Chase and Wells Fargo branches were also vandalized. A Starbucks location near campus was vandalized and looted.
Police also received reports that banks were set on fire in the area of Center Street and Shattuck Avenue.
In a statement Thursday morning, Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin said, "Unfortunately, last night, a small minority of the protesters who had assembled in opposition to a speaking engagement featuring a prominent white nationalist engaged in violence and property damage."
"They also provided the ultra-nationalist far right exactly the images they want to use to try to discredit the vast majority of peaceful protesters in Berkeley and across America who are deeply concerned about where our country is headed," Arreguin said.