Evansville Police Chief Addresses Incident Involving Staff at Chaser’s Bar & Grill

If you live in the tri-state area and you have been on Facebook today, there's a good chance you've seen the violent beating a patron took at a local bar yesterday evening.

Beware, the video is incredibly graphic. (Click here to watch the video)

Shane Hendrix was at Chaser's Bar & Grill on Saturday night when there was a dispute with his tab. After that, another patron filmed three bouncers violently assaulting Hendrix.

An off-duty police officer was on-site during the altercation but, according to EPD, did not witness the event. Evansville Chief of Police Philip Smith released the following statement.

Message from the Chief:
The responsibility of law enforcement is to be the line between order and chaos. The force that is willing to stand up to those that would do harm to and victimize others and hold them accountable. The men and women of the Evansville Police Department do just that on a daily basis. As Chief I get to enjoy them making me look a lot better than I really am on our successes. That also means I fully accept responsibility when we can do better.

The events at a local bar and grill this past weekend have made their way around social media. The business has received harsh criticism based off the actions of a couple of individuals in their employ. To the owner's credit they have been cooperative throughout this entire process. My agency has received criticism on the way we've handled the investigation. I wanted to address couple of things here.

There was an off duty officer working for the business. He was requested outside of the business to address an issue unrelated to the event. During this time the victim, had a dispute with a bartender, and according to witnesses and surveillance he appeared to have lunged at the bartender. The bouncers, intervened by taking the victim to the ground. To this point their actions were justified.

From that point and beyond the actions of the bouncers were unreasonable, brutal, and illegal in my opinion. They went far beyond what someone in charge of the safety of patrons should be doing to keep order in an establishment.

Once the officer returned, the event had already taken place and the bouncers told the officer that the victim was the agitator. The officer, being a trained officer asked to see the footage from inside the bar and saw no indications of the victim being the aggressor. He then drew a case number for an incident report.

According to the officer the video he saw footage of only showed the portion of the incident where the victim was taken to the ground and he did not observe the strikes and kicks that have now been viewed millions of times courtesy of an onlooker. I would like to commend the onlooker for capturing the true events on camera.

Once I learned of this incident, my immediate comment was that those bouncers should be arrested. I am fully aware that I had the advantage of seeing a social media video, like many of you, that my officer was not able to view at the time. When I recieved more facts of the incident I immediately requested detectives to come in and investigate further and I made contact with the owner, who again was cooperative.

The investigation is still very active and to ensure the integrity of the investigation I will come just short of saying what all has happened, but I will say that we are seeking justice for this victim. As long as I am Chief our citizen's safety and justice for victims is my top priority. I will also never allow one of my officers who did the right thing according to the information available to them at the time take the hits. That's my job.
Philip

Ben Walls from Eyewitness News was on the scene at Chasers earlier today when a group of Shane's family and friends gathered outside the bar to raise awareness of the situation. He also reported that Shane's father wants answers and justice for his son.

This is a developing story.