Chair-wielding man Reggie Ray turns himself in over to police
The man spotted wielding a folding chair as a weapon during the wild WWE-style attack on the black co-captain of a riverboat trying to dock in Alabama turned himself in to police Friday.
Reggie Ray, 42, was charged with disorderly conduct and locked up in municipal jail, according to Montgomery police.
He became the fifth person charged in the violent melee, though police previously stated more arrests could be handed down in the next few days.
Mary Todd, 21; Richard Roberts, 48, Allen Todd, 23, and Zachary Shipman, 25, were arrested earlier this week and all charged with assault.
Authorities had been on the hunt for Ray since identifying him as the man who used the chair to whack at least two white boaters after they launched an unprovoked attack on black riverboat co-captain Damien Pickett on the Montgomery Riverfront.
The group was retaliating after catching Pickett trying to move their pontoon boat, which they had illegally parked in a designated docking spot for the city-owned Harriott II riverboat, which was trying to offload its 200 passengers, police said.
Wild footage captured several white adults pouncing on Pickett in a WWE-style takedown that involved punching, kicking and shoving.
The epic fight escalated when Pickett’s coworkers and other bystanders jumped to his rescue, according to police.
The brawl ended with people thrown into the river, several in handcuffs and a viral video of the massive brawl.
Though the fighting groups appeared to split along racial lines — with some witnesses alleging that members of the pontoon party screamed the N-word before instigating the melee — police ruled that it was not racially motivated.
The captain of the Harriott II, Jim Kittrell, thinks otherwise.
“It makes no sense to have six people try to beat the snot out of you just because you moved their boat up a few feet. In my opinion, the attack on Dameion was racially motivated,” Kittrell said.
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