The Concert Incident

This past Friday we (me, Colt, and our friend Gina) went to see Chiodos at Myth in Maplewood, Minnesota. This was part of the reason for our friend's trip out here--to see Chiodos, because they weren't playing near her. We were all pretty excited about it. Gina and I share a huge love of all things Craig Owens (the lead singer of Chiodos.)

Everything started out great. We got our merch and headed for the stage and were almost on the barrier. There was one line of people between us. We ended up stage left. None of this is really relevant, but I'm trying to set the stage. There were three bands set to play before Chiodos. I believe it was during a band called 156/Silence was playing (the one right before Chiodos) that most of this went down, but everything is kind of a blur.

It all started with the couple standing behind our friend. The girl started inappropriately touching her. She grabbed her neck and then caressed her. The first time she thought it might have been an accident, because it gets crowded at shows, but she still thought it was odd. The second time it happened, she turned around and said something about it. Asking them to stop, because it wasn't okay. That was when she told us what was going on and we moved over to try to put ourselves between them and her. She did it one more time and then things just escalated from there. We were all telling her to leave Gina alone. The girl just laughed.

Then she tried to reach around and grab for Gina's purse. I watched her do this. I told Gina to move her purse because she was trying to do I don't even know what. We said something but they both just laughed and didn't take it seriously. At this point Colt put himself between Gina and the couple completely. We tried to go on enjoying ourselves and mid headbang the hat Colt was wearing fell off. Immediately I looked back and watched the guy this girl was with grab the hat. I wasn't sure what he did with it. I asked him because at first I thought he'd pocketed it. He just shrugged and said he threw it towards the mosh pit. I started looking for it and found it. So, I went to grab it. When I bent down to pick it up, this is when I got donkey kicked by the girl in the back and hit the ground hard.

This was when security got involved. Some girls next to us were trying to blame us for what had happened. Luckily a bunch of others around us all said it was the couple behind us. We had hoped that they'd get kicked out, but security just told them to move. I wasn't particularly thrilled that they ended up pretty close to us again, but they left us alone and hopefully left everyone around them alone too.

As someone who has been to more concerts than I can count (I'm talking well over 100, including Warped Tour), a lot of them with mosh pits and loud music, this is the first time I have ever encountered this kind of behavior. My anxiety spiked and I only calmed down once Chiodos started playing and even after the show was over, I was still shaken up.

My knees hurt for the next day, but after that I was okay. It wasn't fun walking around the Mall of America hurting the way I did, but I survived.