We’ve all been there, out at a restaurant and there’s the occasional loud child or group of children acting out. Would you ignore it?
That scenario played out at El Toro Loco in Midtown Friday night and led to one man being rushed to the hospital.
Cell phone video obtained by Local 24 News shows a woman in a pink dress yelling. She can be heard saying, “So, and? My kids don’t got to go to school when they can stay here all night and get that damn camera out of my face.”
“It did kind of get out of hand,” said Trent Stacy, who was dining at the restaurant celebrating a friend’s birthday.
The cell phone video taken by Stacy’s friend shows the tail end of the confrontation.
Stacy says that confrontation left his husband with a deep cut requiring seven stitches.
A police report obtained by Local 24 News said the woman in the pink dress, who hurled a beer mug at the person recording her.
She claimed he choked her and threw the glass in defense. The glass missed the man recording and hit Stacy’s husband.
“I was scared,” he said, “Especially after I saw his head busted open and all the blood.”
Witnesses tell local 24 no one put their hands on the woman in the pink dress.
They claim she threw the glass after someone in the restaurant approached her two children who were running around.
The person had asked them to behave.
“I kind of wish they did nothing,” said Stacy. “You could tell the woman and her group were leaving. It was just unnecessary and caused an accident that should never have happened.”
If you were in that situation or a witness to children behaving badly, what would you do?
Tara Seay is a licensed clinical therapist and family coach. She says kids acting out in public isn’t uncommon, but getting them to behave can be tricky, especially if you’re an outsider looking in.
“No parent wants to be told what to do,” said Seay. “They want to know they’re doing the best job, even if they’re not.”
Seay says the last thing anyone should do is become an aggressor.
“If you see someone is not receptive to a warm conversation at that point you want to back out,” she said. “You don’t want to become an aggressor. Just seek an outsider and say, ‘Hey, I think someone needs some help.'”
In this case, witnesses say no restaurant employee or manager at El Toro Loco was alerted until the situation got out of hand.
Local 24 News reached out to the restaurant for comment but the owner was not available to talk.
“When people get into this type of thing or have a disagreement like this, just go and talk to a manager,” said Stacy. “This doesn’t need to happen again. This is really a bad thing, and now my husband has to pay the price.”
According to Memphis Police, there is video surveillance of the incident. They have a copy of it and are investigating.
So far no charges have been filed.
