A snowball fight becomes mean

By PETULA DVORAK

WASHINGTON — The snowballs. The crowd. The gun.

What happened at the intersection of 14th and U streets Saturday afternoon wasn’t just about a snowball fight and a road-raging cop. It was a complicated passion play about Washington, its neighborhoods and the chasm that sometimes gapes wide between its people. In this scenario, no one was right.

It began with a massive, flash-mob snowball fight fueled by Tweets, Facebook and word-of-mouth on that snowy day. The digital natives had a joyous rumpus that afternoon, giddy from falling snow and childhood memories.

Really, is there anything better than a good snowball fight when the snow plentiful and it’s Saturday?

Online, they agreed to meet at 14th and U, the same place revelers swarmed on election night, on inauguration night and on many nights of Marvin’s chicken and waffles or Gibson’s Sazeracs or late-night half-smokes at Ben’s.

“This intersection is where we gather, where we celebrate, where we are a community,” said Lacy MacAuley, 31, who brought a sign that said “No War ... But Snowball War” to the blizzard battle.

“It was all kinds of people. White, black, Hispanic, young, old,” said Will Goins, 52, who watched it all unfold from his familiar haunt near the corner McDonald’s. “They went across the street at each other like gladiators. Looked like fun.”

They played Capture the Flag and pushed out the cars that got stuck in the snow, including a passing police cruiser.

Lots of folks said the crowd of about 200 began pelting cars as they slowly maneuvered through the snowy streets.

It was a treacherous drive. I was right there at that intersection about an hour earlier, white-knuckling it the whole way while I drove our babysitter home. A few snowballs at my windshield would’ve seriously sucked.

When Detective Mike Baylor’s maroon Humvee crunched the snow with its massive all-terrain tires, it was a tantalizing mark.

Splat! Lots of splat. So much splat that Baylor got of the car and drew his gun. And that was a really bad thing to do.

Much of it was captured, at various angles, on many video cameras and camera phones. It’s all over YouTube.

“If this is how he behaves on camera, how does he treat people when he knows there’s no camera recording him?” MacAuley said.

Which is absolutely a good point.

A gun

Baylor yelled at the snowballers. Shockingly, although the Abominable Snowcop had a gun, some of them kept pelting him. And once he told them he was police, someone still threw one right at his face. A cop who knows him said you just don’t mess with Baylor’s vehicle.

But Baylor is also an officer, a man with a gun. And apparently he had a hard time unwinding those two strands of himself that day, the puffy-chested, don’t-touch-my-ride man and the detective who is respected, serious, hard-working, earnest and carries a gun.

He messed up, and Police Chief Cathy Lanier was the first to say so: “Let me be very clear in stating that I believe the actions of the officer were totally inappropriate!” Lanier said in a statement. “In no way, should he have handled the situation in this manner.”

His snowball rage was heartbreaking to a police department that worked hard all day, fishtailing their government-issue Impalas through unplowed streets while their children sledded without them.

“This has been awful for me. I’ve been getting calls all day. Mean calls. And my family has been getting them, too,” said Detective Elmer “Buddy” Baylor, who works in the bank robbery division and was not at the snowball scene that day, though he has been harassed by callers who are yelling at the wrong Baylor.

The real Baylor isn’t talking, but some people get where he might have been coming from.

“It’s hard when you think about it. The thing with cops or, like, military people is, they’re always on guard, you know?” said Jamal Mufti, who owns JJ’s Cheesesteaks at 14th and U. “Like my friend who just got back from Afghanistan. Fireworks freak him out. Someone got out a laser pointer and pointed at him, and he jumped. The cops, they’re facing different stuff on the street. So a snowball to a car, that can freak him out if he’s seen gunfire.”

Police officers see some seriously scary stuff. It’s a delicate balance to adjust that hyper-vigilance of dark alleys, the drive to survive after another night of work with the parameters of civilian life.

Baylor failed that test Saturday, and he’ll pay with a serious tarnish to a long career.

As for the snowball snipers, they’ve gotten their YouTube glory. But the place to have a snowball fight wasn’t 14th and U, where many native Washingtonians remember the 1968 riots as well as the historic election 20 years later, a place where people were trying to get to work in the snow, walking in tire tracks with grocery bags rubber-banded around their feet. Sorry if not all of them saw the joy in the moment.