Downtown brawl, stabbings tie up police, send 3 to hospital early Saturday

It took more than 17 Spokane Police Department Officers to contain an early Saturday morning brawl that sent three people to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, including a man with a pair of stab wounds, another man who was struck with a street sign and stabbed with a hair pick, and a woman who had facial injuries.

That’s according to a press release from the SPD.

The release says officers responded around 1:15 a.m. to a report of a fight involving eight people outside of the bars in the 400 block of W. Sprague Ave.

A second call claimed a stabbing and a shooting had occured at the scene.

Though it was later determined that no shots were fired, two of the three hospitalized victims suffered stab wounds. One man had two such wounds. The second man had a “large head wound … sustained when he was struck with a street sign” and a stab wound from “a 5-inch spike from a hair pick (that) was stuck in his calf,” according to the release.

Police say the incident began when a man and woman tried to break up a fight in the street between two women they didn’t know. The violence quickly escalated.

Between five and 10 males attacked the lone male who had originally intervened in the female fight, according to the release.

As the group of males followed him into the street and surrounded him, he reportedly produced a knife and stabbed one of the attackers. Eventually, he was disarmed, hit with a street sign and knocked to the ground and struck multiple times, the release said.

Two unrelated additional fights broke out in the crowd while the investigation was ongoing. People were arrested from those incidents and a gun was taken from a male involved in one of those fights, police say.

Numerous people who sustained injuries during the incident did not want to pursue charges or fled prior to police arrival.

One suspect was arrested for an unrelated felony warrant. The investigation is ongoing.