Amid calls from some Miami officials to cancel Ultra after one fence storming resulted in the near-death of 28-year-old security guard Erica Mack, a new video has surfaced showing more than a dozen Ultra fans hopping another fence to sneak in. (Tickets to the three-day event retailed at close to $500, so, you know...)
Zach Jacobs, editor of EDMSouthFlorida.com who shot the video, tells Crossfade that on Saturday evening, a group of people had jumped the fence to enter the festival without tickets; roughly half made it clean into the festival, he said, while the others are shown jumping back over the fence to retreat from security who had caught on to the attempt and were rushing to stop the sneak-in. After the incident, Jacobs said, police increased their presence at this particular section of fence.
See also: Miami Police Chief: Ultra Organizers Could Face Charges Over Trampling
At a news conference yesterday, Miami Police Chief Manuel Orosa said other videos from past years similar to this one show a different phenomenon from the near-fatal incident on Saturday. That's because where the fences are properly secured, as in this video, gate-crashers tumble over instead of barreling through the perimeter.
"In previous years, there really hasn't been a rush to the fence because they know they can't take it down," Orosa said. "What you'll see on YouTube is people jumping, climbing up the G8 fence [eight-foot welded riot fence]. Every year, that happens. It's expected. Ultra understands that, and they expect that, because you have too many people out there walking around looking for vulnerability in a fence area."
The chief did ask for any video connected to the near-fatal gate storming on Saturday.
"[We're] looking into the possibility of film that was out there; anybody with film please call us so that we can get a copy of it," Orosa said. "We are visiting all the nearby banks and stuff to see if they have any footage of what happened. We're trying to figure out what exactly caused it, what happened, and we are also asking people if they have any videos they took from a cell phone, any of that nature, please give us a call so we can get copies of those as well."
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