Police seeking warrant to arrest Berkeley assault suspect

Last Tuesday two men walked up to a conservative table set up in Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza and started harassing Hayden Williams, the person who was manning it. When Williams felt the encounter was getting out of hand he pulled out his cell-phone camera to start recording. One of the men smacked it out of his hand, then flipped over his table. At this point, the aggressor began shouting and threatened to shoot Williams. A bystander pulled out his phone and began recording the incident. He caught the end of the confrontation which was the man in all black calling Williams racist and punching him in the face.

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Last Friday, three days after the attack, police said they had identified the individual who threw the punch but did not release a name. But nothing seemed to happen over the weekend. Yesterday, one week from the date of the attack and four days from the date the suspect was ID’d, Fox News contacted Berkeley and the police department and was told there was no new information on the case:

On Tuesday, the media relations office for UC-Berkeley told Fox News there were no updates in the case. The UC-Berkeley police department website’s most recent update is from Friday. After several efforts to contact the public information officer for the police department, Fox News was told he was out sick, and that there were no updates to report.

Curiously, a Berkeley spokesman gave an update to the independent news outlet Berkleyside (and other outlets) the same afternoon:

UC Berkeley police are seeking a felony warrant to arrest the person the department suspects is the man caught on camera punching a conservative activist on campus last week.

“The District Attorney will evaluate the case. If the warrant is issued, UCPD will immediately pursue the suspect’s arrest,” said campus spokesman Dan Mogulof in a statement sent late Tuesday afternoon.

The arrest warrant is needed because the suspect is in his home. If the police had arrived during the attack, they could have arrested him on the street without a warrant. But the good news is that the wheels of justice are still grinding, albeit slowly in this case. Hopefully, we’ll have an arrest today or tomorrow and we’ll get to find out who the attacker is and maybe why he did this. It appears that, despite the backpack, the attacker is not a student at the school.

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Hayden Williams appeared on Fox News this morning and said he felt the police were doing good work in the case but criticized the campus administration for allowing the situation to degrade to the point where something like this could happen and even be cheered on by some on campus. He’s referring at least in part to a Berkeley employee who tweeted after the attack that it made him feel “emotionally so much better.”

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