Audio By Carbonatix
Three people walk into a strip club and start hitting a dancer “with closed fists.” The cops show up. Nobody gets put in handcuffs.
Not exactly a joke. More of a riddle, we’d say.
Marqualia Bernard is a dancer at Exposure Sports Cabaret, a fairly new club conveniently located near a tangle of freeways and Love Field Airport. According to a police report, she was sitting in the club around 1 a.m. this morning when three women, whom she knew, entered the club “and immediately started walking towards her in an aggressive manner.”
Bernard stood up. The women “overpowered her,” the report says, and started hitting her.
When news happens, Dallas Observer is there —
Your support strengthens our coverage.
We’re aiming to raise $30,000 by December 31, so we can continue covering what matters most to you. If the Dallas Observer matters to you, please take action and contribute today, so when news happens, our reporters can be there.
Security broke up the fight and removed the women from the club. When the cops showed up, a security guard issued each lady a criminal trespass warning. The cops then wrote all the women citations (they were 22, 26, and 27, according to DPD’s records). Then they let them go.
Dallas police Senior Corporal Melinda Gutierrez says the women were cited, not arrested, because the fight was a misdemeanor offense that the cops didn’t witness first-hand. “I’m surprised they were still around to get tickets,” she says, actually sounding quite surprised.
“It could also — I’m just saying, could, I don’t know that — that [Bernard] may not have wanted to press charges,” the officer adds. “But because it was a fight in a club, the officers issued citations instead. Then if she wanted to go in and drop charges, she could. I don’t know if that’s the case though. [The report] doesn’t say anything about injury to her.”
“Usually if you have a bunch of kids fighting, everyone gets a citation,” Gutierrez says. “Unless one person is singled out, like in this case.”
“It sounds like a girl fight.”
