Police officers responded to a fight at the family restaurant on Saturday in North Charleston, South Carolina, according to an incident report obtained by Newsweek. While en route, the officers learned that someone at the location had a gun.
A mother at the party said chaos broke out after two 12-year-olds started to fight and parents got involved, according to WCSC-TV.
Police arrived to find a “large crowd inside the business arguing and attempting to attack one another,” said the incident report. A security guard told officers that one of the brawlers had punched him in the head with a closed fist.
As police attempted to clear the building and push individuals toward their cars to leave the area, groups of people continued to “verbally threaten each other and on multiple occasions attempted to attack each other,” officers said.
Police booked suspects Lizeller Dixon and Dashawn Malik Grant into custody for breach of peace. Suspect Jasmine Ciera Judge was also arrested for breach of peace but released on the scene with a summons, according to the police report.
A fourth suspect was detained for allegedly hitting the security guard. He was released after the guard said he could not identify who punched him.
Kenneth MacBride, who works at a store near the Chuck E. Cheese, told WYFF-TV that he saw several police cars “flying in” to the parking lot.
“About 100 people evacuated, and they were all screaming and cursing at each other. It was intense,” he told the local station.
MacBride said he was disturbed by the incident, which kept police there for over an hour.
“It doesn’t make me feel great to know that there are young children there for a birthday party witnessing something that they’re going to be traumatized by now,” he said.
Police were called to this same Chuck E. Cheese twice in 2016, once for a shooting and once for a burglary, local outlets reported.
Meanwhile, on New Year’s Eve 2021, a father was fatally shot as he walked into a Chuck E. Cheese in Humble, Texas, while carrying his daughter’s birthday cake. The man reportedly got into an argument with a driver in the parking lot.
A mother of five was shot and killed during an argument inside a Chuck E. Cheese in Davenport, Iowa, in 2020.
And in 2018, a 22-year-old man accidentally shot himself with a firearm he was carrying at a Chuck E. Cheese in Tacoma, Washington.
Newsweek reached out to Chuck E. Cheese for comment.