'Free Reggie' starts trending calling for chair-wielding brawl man to be freed
Social media users have called for charges against a man seen wielding a chair in a brawl in Alabama that went viral across the world to be dropped with "Free Reggie" trending on Twitter.
Reggie Ray turned himself in three days after Montgomery Police Chief Daryl Albert asked him to contact authorities. He is charged with disorderly conduct, police confirmed, and he was released after being held in the Municipal Jail on Friday.
'Free Reggie' was trending on the social media app X, also known as Twitter, and a GoFundMe has been set up, raising close to $200,000 in legal fees.
Comments on the page include "Not all heroes wear capes," "Free him!" and "This man needs the support."
Ray is the fifth person to be charged in connection with the brawl after Major Saba Coleman of the Montgomery Police Department said 21-year-old Mary Todd had also been arrested. She is charged with assault in the third degree.
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Ray charged with disorderly conduct (Montgomery police)Richard Roberts, 48, was arrested alongside Alan Todd, 23 and Zachary Shipman, 25. Two warrants were issued for Roberts while there was one each for Todd and Shipman; all three men are white.
Police previously described him as the man seen “wielding that folding chair” in a brawl that many have noted appeared to take place along racial lines. In footage, a man can be seen using a chair as a weapon as people try to get out of the Alabama River at the Montgomery Riverfront.
The fight appeared to be caused when the co-captain of the riverboat Harriott II attempted to address the owners of a pontoon boat that was blocking the vessel from docking safely. The Harriott II had 227 passengers on board at the time.
Montgomery, in America's deep south, has a bleak history regarding incidents of racism. The riverfront location is where slaveowners once unloaded enslaved people from steamboats to be sold.
The city is known for incidents including when fifteen-year-old black schoolgirl Claudette Colvin refused to give up her bus seat for a white man in 1955.
Rosa Parks also rejected an order to move seats in the same ear and both incidents led to the Montgomery bus boycott, a key event in the fight for civil rights in the US.
The fight began when the co-captain addressed the owners of a pontoon boat (tiktok)Crew member Damieon Pickett, a Black man, police in a handwritten statement to authorities included in court documents that he was attacked after moving a pontoon boat a few feet so the city-owned riverboat could dock.
Pickett was named as a victim alongside teen deckhand, 16, who was punched and is white. The deckhand's mother heard a racial slur before Pickett was hit, she wrote in a statement.
Police said they consulted with the FBI and determined what happened on the riverfront did not qualify as a hate crime. Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed, the city's first Black mayor, said he will trust the investigative process, but said his "perspective as a Black man in Montgomery differs from my perspective as mayor".
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The Harriott II (Getty Images)He added: "From what we've seen from the history of our city - a place tied to both the pain and the progress of this nation - it seems to meet the moral definition of a crime fuelled by hate, and this kind of violence cannot go unchecked.
"It is a threat to the durability of our democracy, and we are grateful to our law enforcement professionals, partner organisations and the greater community for helping us ensure justice will prevail."
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