Plenty of video clips are like this; there is more going on than you can see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/n...-option.html?nl=nyregion&emc=edit_ur_20130223
[h=1]In Fracas on Train, Parolee Found That Hitting Back Was a Risky Option[/h][h=6]By
MICHAEL WILSON[/h]?You could have at least said, ?Excuse me.? ?
And with those eight words, it was on.
The No. 3 train had pulled into the Utica Avenue stop in Brooklyn that afternoon, Jan. 24, and several passengers rushed to board the waiting No. 4 train, among them a 55-year-old man and two teenage girls. On this, everyone agrees.
The man, Charles Bunn, said one of the girls bumped into him. He was annoyed, and after he took his seat and saw the two girls sitting across from him, he spoke those eight words.
As Mr. Bunn tells it, the friend of the girl who bumped him stood up and screamed to her that she didn?t have to say anything, and then turned on Mr. Bunn.
?They both jumped up, and then I jumped up, and that?s when the tussle started,? he said.
A few moments later, someone else on the train started recording the fight on a cellphone. The video, which
made its way online, shows the two girls raining punches on Mr. Bunn, while he crouched with his coat pulled over his head, unable to swing. The coat was yanked away, and Mr. Bunn threw a few punches of his own that he said did not connect. It is hard to tell on the video. ?I was swinging just to back them off,? he said.
Another man broke up the fracas, and one of the girls, Chantelis Solano, 18, sat down, clearly flustered on the video. She stripped off her coat and yelled something that sounded, on the video, an awful lot like the word ?pregnant.?
Mr. Bunn seemed to answer, incredulously, ?You?re pregnant??
It was true. ?I had just found out,? Ms. Solano said later in an interview. She and her friend were traveling to the Bronx for a sonogram, she said. And yet, even after the fight had been broken up, she stood and baited Mr. Bunn, saying, ?C?mon,? and ?Try me.? He did not respond.
All three got off the train at Franklin Avenue. The girls, shouting and cursing, pursued Mr. Bunn as he walked away. Everyone agreed there were more punches, and Mr. Bunn dropped some papers. He picked them up and walked away, the girls following him. The train, and the person filming the fight, departed.
The last thing Mr. Bunn needed was to get caught hitting someone, especially a girl. ?I have to suck up a lot of things now,? he said later. ?I?m amazed I didn?t do what I wanted to do.?
He had been released from prison just a month earlier, his fourth time behind bars upstate. He had two bad habits. One was cocaine. The other was walking out of the flagship Macy?s department store with merchandise he had not paid for. He said he got away with it many times, but he was finally caught in 2008. He spent a year in prison. He was no stranger to fighting. Old guys like him are frequent targets of beatings from younger inmates looking to make names for themselves, he said.
?They always want to test the waters,? he said. ?But they were in for a big surprise. I was in the Golden Gloves in 1976.?
He came out of prison clean and sober. And, yet, he was still thinking about Macy?s. ?I was just curious to see how I could do without drugs,? he said. He was caught leaving the store with five pairs of shoes.
?Some guys like to be on the inside,? a parole officer told him last year. ?Are you one of those guys??
?Absolutely not,? he said. He was paroled, and was coming back from a job search when he met the two girls, he said.
Police officers saw the end of the scuffle on the platform and arrested the girls. Mr. Bunn was treated for scratches and cuts at a hospital. ?My pride was shot,? he said. ?They?re girls.?
Ms. Solano said she spent a couple of days in jail. She and her friend, Shaquana Rhem, have been charged with assault, harassment and, for striking Mr. Bunn with a purse, possession of a weapon. It was not Ms. Solano?s first time; she has a pending case involving an assault in Westchester County two years ago, she said.
She had changed, or so she thought. ?The video showed a totally different side of me that I try to leave in my past,? she said. Mr. Bunn, not the girls, started the fight and punched them before the video began, she said, adding, ?I?m a victim.?
The list of victims, she said, continued to grow. Ten days after her release from jail, in a development that she believes ? but cannot prove ? was connected to the fight, Ms. Solano said she felt severe cramps and was taken to a hospital.
?I lost my child,? she said.
