After reviewing the incident with team members yesterday, coach Jack Parker said last night that a Sunday morning altercation between Boston University men's hockey players and several assailants was not a random attack as he previously stated.
Seniors Kevin Schaeffer and Sean Sullivan were hospitalized Sunday after an altercation outside a Wadsworth Street residence, in which goalie and assistant captain John Curry also received minor injuries. Schaeffer was released from Brigham and Women's Hospital yesterday.
Parker said junior goalie Karson Gillespie and a friend not on the hockey team had been involved in a prior scuffle with two unknown assailants an hour before the brawl. One assailant was reportedly involved in the both incidents.
The attack occurred around 4 a.m., when men in black hooded sweatshirts wielding baseball bats, wrenches and crowbars allegedly attacked several victims in front of 9 Wadsworth St. in Allston, according to a police report.
Witness accounts of the altercation vary, but four neighbors who were present said the fight involved between 15 and 20 people and was the culmination of the two altercations. The police report, on the other hand, had indicated the altercation was a random assault perpetrated by only three people.
A junior lacrosse player, identified by a source close to the team who requested anonymity as Lauren Morton, was also hit with a bat in the left jaw.
"She saw [Sullivan] knocked out and went to grab him out of the fight because he was knocked out and bleeding," said the source, who was with the players earlier in the evening but was not present during the altercation. "She went and grabbed him and she got hit in the face with a bat. Nothing's broken [in her jaw]. It's just bad, so I think they blatantly hit her."
Curry was not hospitalized, while Sullivan was released from the hospital Sunday. Schaeffer was discharged Monday after suffering a fractured orbital bone and dislocated thumb.
"They don't know how his eye is, so they have to wait till that heals up, and then they'll make an evaluation whether or not they have to have surgery on it to repair it or not," Parker said.
According at a witness, the assailant continued to bash Schaeffer's head after he had fallen to the ground. Parker, however, said the defenseman was hit just once.
"I saw some guy just going up and down with the bat, swinging it," said the witness, a Bunker Hill Community College student who requested that she be identified by her first name, Connie. "All I could see was the bat go up, the bat go down, the bat go up, the bat go down."
"The guy came running up and hit Schaeffer with a baseball bat," Parker said. "I think they just two-handed him -- one blow did all the damage."
Sullivan received staples in his head to close a gash created when he was struck by "some sort of instrument," according to Parker.
The first confrontation, involving Gillespie and a friend, occurred around 3 a.m., according to Connie and roommate Andrew Johanson, a Berklee School of Music sophomore. Parker corroborated the sequence of events, claiming that Gillespie left the party early to walk home a friend who had "too much to drink."
After leaving 9 Wadsworth St., Parker said, Gillespie and the friend encountered two men allegedly standing outside of 15 Wadsworth St. and exchanged "some words" with them.
"Gillespie wound up getting in a fight with the guy and then another guy got involved with it, so it was a 2-on-1 with Gillespie," Parker said. "His buddy . . . was useless to him, and somebody went back in and told the guys at 9 Wadsworth that Gillespie was in a fight. So [Brian] McGuirk and Curry went down, McGuirk [went] first, and broke it up . . . Curry came down, by the time Curry got there it was broken up completely and it was, they thought, the end of it."
Johanson said he saw the end of the first scuffle.
"I was watching TV," he said. "Then five minutes later, I got up after this huge uproar and there's a kid lying on the ground over [at 15 Wadsworth] with his shirt off. A short, fat, stubby no-neck type of deal, he was on the ground curled in a ball and this other kid was kicking him and calling him a pansy."
Johanson said he was sure, however, that the first fight ended with both sides going back to their respective houses.
"They finally got him inside," Johanson said of the man on the ground. "Then two minutes later, he came back with a bat."
McGuirk, after breaking up the first fight, quickly defused a second situation before returning to 9 Wadsworth St. with Curry and Gillespie, said Parker.
"He turned and said to him 'Hey, I told you this was over -- that's the end of it, get out of here,'" Parker said of McGuirk. "The guy left."
"It stopped for a while," Connie confirmed. "I thought the peace came."
Then, as the team members left the party, "four to six" men walked toward 9 Wadsworth St. carrying bats, wrenches and hammers, Parker said. Johanson estimated that the fight ended up involving five people from each houses, while neighbor Kent Anderson estimated there were five to eight assailants.
"The first guy tried to attack [Sullivan], and Sully saw him coming and went low on him and got at him and another guy hit Sully over the head with some type of instrument -- it might have been a wrench or something -- and caught him pretty good," Parker said. "He went down, then he got hit in the face with something, [gave him a] black eye.
"Curry immediately saw it happen and he went to turn and the guy suckered him with something, it wasn't his fist, he hit him with something, really bruised his eye up pretty good," Parker continued.
Schaeffer, who was walking out of the house with his sister Kelly in front of him, was "knocked out cold," Parker said. He then reportedly fell onto his sister, toppling down the steps that lead from the 9 Wadsworth St. porch to the street.
"When he did, he wrenched his left thumb and dislocated it so it looks like an 'S,'" Parker said. "And then a girl from the lacrosse team got hit with a bat and dislocated her jaw.
"Then Schaeffer's sister was screaming so bad because her brother was lying on the ground unconscious that the attackers just took off and ran down the street," Parker continued. "Nobody knows what happened to them after that."
Then Morton, one of a "bunch of girls" outside during the fight according to Connie, got involved.
"It was such a drunken mess," Connie said. "There were so many girls just trying to get in the way to break it up. I think [Morton] was throwing herself to protect the other kid. Hopefully, a guy wouldn't hit a girl with a bat."
Neighbors Anderson and Ken Gold, both juniors at Emerson College, watched the incident from a balcony across the street.
"I was in bed when I started hearing anything, and I woke up because I heard a girl screaming very loudly 'Call 911,'" Gold said. "I heard people over there on the phone with 911 saying 'We need cops here.'"
"I saw the guys running away," said Anderson. "They were like 'Cops are coming, cops are coming,' and they ran down the street. They just ran down the street and turned the corner about two blocks away."
None of the witnesses mentioned the presence of a getaway car, which was described in the police report.
Witness accounts vary, with some claiming that the police came first and some claiming that the fire truck arrived before police. But eventually, Johanson and Anderson said, Schaeffer was taken away on a stretcher.
An ambulance brought him to Brigham and Women's, Parker said, while one of the police cars transported Schaeffer's sister and Sullivan to the same hospital.
On Monday, a bloodstain still was visible on the sidewalk in front of 9 Wadsworth St., while other alleged remnants remained.
"There was blood all over the front doorstep," Johanson said. "It was ridiculous. They tried to wash it off, but it wouldn't come off."
"I saw somebody over there [yesterday] picking up a bat in two halves," Gold said.
Officer David Estraba of the Boston Police Department told The Daily Free Press the investigation is ongoing and no suspects have been named as of yet. But the assailants were not BU students, Parker and Johanson claim.
The events that transpired were ghastly, Parker said, but the night out was well within the team's rules.
"Nothing good happens after two o'clock in the morning anyways, but I don't have any guys breaking any team rules," Parker said. "Here we have a team rule that you can't drink except for Saturday night. If you're under 21, you can't drink at all. The guys were of age and it was Saturday night, so I don't have any problem with that. They were at a BU party for BU friends and all of a sudden they get accosted by some folks from out of town."
Curry and Sullivan were with the team Monday during a non-skating practice. They await the results of a concussion test, to be compared with a preseason baseline screening before being cleared to play.
"I think they're all pissed off, aggravated that, A - it happened, and, B - that they have to deal with these type of assholes," Parker said of his players. "But more than anything else, they're concerned about their teammates."
As of Monday night, the players were not yet available for comment, said senior assistant director of athletic communications Brian Kelley.
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