ST. PAUL –Somehow things got out of hand amidst an otherwise peaceful protest that snaked throughout the skyscrapers of downtown St. Paul this afternoon. And Richard Stryker was on his bicycle to see it.
Stryker, of St. Paul, said he saw a group of about 50 people wearing black marching when three of them broke from the crowd and heaved a metal street sign through the corner display windows of Macy’s, a rather posh department store. Then the one of them jumped on top of an unoccupied police car and bashed in several windows with a stick that, to Stryker, didn’t look much different from a broom stick. They also apparently smashed a tire.
“It happened very, very quickly,” Stryker told The Eagle and a few other reporters who happened upon the scene. The three vandals ran back in and mixed in with the group of marchers. The vandals were among several breakaway groups that roamed the streets of St. Paul today chanting and screaming at police dressed in full riot gear, according to other media reports.
Updated with video
ST. PAUL — Stephen Anderson couldn’t quite get his wheel barrow into the mostly locked down Republican National Convention area today. When he told police he would fill it with manure, as he has done through the years at various rallies, police said no way, the Alma, Kan. man said. But Anderson found his way to the protesters’ podium nonetheless. He spoke to a crowd of nine, which included two reporters from Kansas, one from the Los Angeles Times and a fleeting crew from the Times of London.
Dressed in a farmer’s get up — a short-sleeved shirt, blue jeans, boots and cowboy hat — the mustached farmer laid out a 50-minute speech, ripping what he called a failed farm bill, a disastrous North American Free Trade Agreement and the follies of the Iraq War.
Anderson said he was nearly in tears driving through Iowa en route to the convention when he saw abandoned farms among the flat fields. “Rural America is dead,” he said after his speech. “But no one has the guts or courage to write the obituary.”
Meanwhile, dozens of police dressed in full riot gear marched near the podium in anticipation of several thousand protesters who planned to arrive near the stage around 1 p.m. Anderson said he might join in — with the protesters that is.
ST. PAUL –Somehow things got out of hand amidst an otherwise peaceful protest that snaked throughout the skyscrapers of downtown St. Paul this afternoon. And Richard Stryker was on his bicycle to see it.