Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Pedal Pub ambushed by "flash mob" downtown

Via Tom

Before Pedal Pub season came to a close, Scott Ranney and his wife decided they ought to give it a try. They rounded up five other couples and drove in from their Lakeville home for a night in the city.

Everything was going great on the gooney contraption until the group started to make its way to The Local. As they headed down Nicollet Mall, the pub rolled to a stop at a red light. Then it all went to hell.

"It happened so fast," recalls Ranney.

Even before they got to the light, Ranney says the bar-on-wheels ran into trouble near the light rail stop. He says a group of about seven or eight 10-year-olds jumped on the Pedal Pub and tried to grab their wallets.

"They were just being annoying and rude saying things like, 'Oh, we're so wasted,'" he says. "It was really disturbing."

After a while, the Pedal Pubbers managed to kick the kids off and continued to the intersection of 6th Street and Nicollet.

Almost the instant they stopped at a red light, a crowd of "25 to 40 young African Americans" suddenly materialized and surrounded the pub, as Ranney told police later. The teenagers jumped up on the bar, shaking the whole contraption and screaming indecipherably. Ranney says a couple of the kids tried to grab purses from an overhead storage compartment, but that as they retreated, they dropped everything except his wife's BlackBerry.

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