Bouncer Fights Multiple Attackers With Knife!

[stonyman]

Below is a story of a bouncer who apparently defended himself with a pocket knife while being jumped by several guys with violent tendencies.


Bouncer: Former Tulane player acted in self-defense
by Gwen Filosa, The Times-Picayune
Saturday June 21, 2008, 3:36 PM
An Orleans Parish jury will likely render a verdict Sunday in the attempted murder trial of a former Tulane football player accused of stabbing five people outside a Bourbon Street nightclub in September.

Ray Boudreaux Jr., 23, who came to New Orleans from Abbeville to play football and study at Tulane University, is charged with five counts of attempted murder for participating in a bloody brawl at dawn on Sept. 16 outside the Utopia club.

Today, the defense team spent hours calling witnesses whose testimony supports Boudreaux's contention that he acted only in self-defense after a band of men began beating him in the 200 block of Bourbon Street following a verbal altercation between two groups of friends earlier inside the club.

It was the group of alleged victims who started trouble before daybreak Sept. 16, the defense team argued, pitting the honors student with no criminal history against a group of men with prior convictions and reputations for solving disagreements with their fists and weapons.

"I'm going to kill you, I'm going to kill you," is what victim Larry Brooks told Boudreaux, a Bourbon Street club bouncer testified today for the defense. One of the men fighting Boudreaux and his friends had a gun at one point, the bouncer said.

"They tried to run away, Ray and his family," he said. "It was self-defense."

"He was chased," the beefy bouncer told the jury, using palm-sized action figures to recreate the nine-month-old brawl that sent five people to the hospital.

Also, another fight was going on across the street from Utopia, the bouncer said. Ray Boudreaux Jr. never started anything but instead was unwillingly dragged into the violence after taking a beating from Brooks and his crew, the bouncer said.

Brooks, 38, spent two weeks healing from seven stab wounds -- including three to the back -- and testified for the state Friday that Boudreaux was the aggressor that morning.

But today, the defense team launched its side of the case: Boudreaux was targeted by Brooks, and at least one other man who the state presents as the victims.

The jury will return Sunday at 10 a.m. for closing arguments.

"He was chased," the bouncer said, "by Big Baby, Rocky, and Twin. They started beating him."

Just as prosecutors had their own videotape footage of the brawl -- the graphic scene of a red-shirted man going after Brooks in what appears to be an unwarranted attack -- the defense showed another videotape today which depicts street fighting among a group of men that took place before Boudreaux allegedly ended the fight with a half-serrated blade kept in his pocket knife.

One conviction of attempted murder carries up to 50 years in prison.

Boudreaux was immediately suspended from Tulane after his arrest five days after the brawl. Inside his Metairie apartment, the honors student allowed Jefferson Parish detectives to search his home, where they found the pocket knife.

When Det. Sgt. Darren Monie told him that anything other than the truth "would have a negative effect" on him, Boudreaux owned up to having stabbed several people outside Utopia and that the pocket knife stored inside his bedroom was the weapon he used.

Monie testified Friday, recounting what he heard Boudreaux confess that day.

But Boudreaux later told New Orleans police that he acted in self-defense. On Saturday, Judge Arthur Hunter had the jury return for the second day of testimony. The panel, which is almost exclusively male and white in a case where the victims and defendant are African-American, has been sequestered since jury selection ended Thursday.

Only ten of the 12 jurors must agree to render a legal verdict on each of the five charges. Hunter's staff said it is likely that the trial will wrap up tonight, but the court is prepared to continue Sunday if the need for more time arises.

The bouncer said that he knows Brooks and the other alleged victims as fellow service industry workers on Bourbon Street, and from their visits to the club where he is head of security. He also said he grew up with several of them, including Brooks, at the Iberville public housing development. But prosecutors said Brooks grew up at the St. Bernard complex, which the bouncer said wasn't true.

"We have problems with them all the time," the bouncer said of Brooks and his friends. "I don't dislike them as people I just don't like their violent attitude toward people."

The bouncer said he tried to contact police and the district attorney's office to tell them what he saw that morning, but received no responses.

See more in Breaking News, Court news, Crime :: Metro, Crime: Orleans
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[dete]

I think Im not the only one wondering, what kind of model was the pocket knife?

[stonyman]

Yeah, they seem to be holding that answer close to the vest!