Novato’s Sinaloa Middle School was the scene of a brawl between four teenage girls Friday, which begat a mob of students stampeding the campus and sometimes trampling one another, which then begat a large meeting with irate parents Tuesday night.

This has been a pretty tempestuous end to the school year in the Bay Area on several academic levels. College commencements have been disrupted by Palestine protests, and last week we saw a shooting outside a high school graduation in Oakland. Now it's the middle schoolers seeing violent unrest close out their 2023-24 school year, as KTVU reports on a lunch period brawl at Novato’s Sinaloa Middle School last Friday, which led to a stampede and some trampling, and a Tuesday night meeting with parents who were not at all happy about the situation.

The KTVU segment above shows only a few seconds of the fight itself, which seems to just involve four girls ranging from 12 to 14 years old. "I think that all she was trying to do was defend herself and she was trying to knock away blocks and stuff but the other three were on top of her going after her and not stopping," parent Christina Carroll told KGO.

But there were apparently rumors flying around the school all day that an attack was coming, and students were amped up perhaps hoping for a front-row view. According to KTVU, the principal sent an email to parents after the incident saying that the rumors "resulted in a very large stampede of our students (several hundreds of them) rushing around the campus to seek out the fight to watch it happen. This mob grew in size as they ran through the campus, causing some students to fall and literally be run over by others."

According to KGO, school administrators anticipated the attack might come Thursday, though it did not, and they reportedly had extra security Friday when it happened.

And KGO also thinks they may have a “gotcha” that police were not notified.

"So the school district was aware but the police department wasn't?" KGO reporter J.R. Stone asked Novato Police Department captain Sasha D'Amico.

"Correct," D'Amico told the station. "So if we had been requested as part of our agreement with the school district we definitely would have been involved but that is something we need a request and need information to act on it."

It seems this was all related to bullying, and frankly, it appears that a group of girls who'd been on the wrong end of that bullying got their measure of revenge.

One parent whose daughter was arrested told KGO, "They're being told they're fat, they're ugly, their hair is ugly, balls being thrown at them every single day at school."

KGO reports that “several arrests have been made,” though it’s unclear how many students were arrested. These being middle schoolers, their names are not being released.

Related: The Kids Are Not Alright: Teens Brawling In Large Mobs at Stonestown Mall [SFist]

Image: Sinaloa Spartans PTSA Novato via Facebook

In a case where the sentenced killer had been well-connected with City Hall officials, a brawl broke out between the victim’s family and the defendant’s friends after Norteño gang member Fernando Madrigal was sentenced to 33 years in prison.

It was already a highly unusual case, where a so-called former gang member who’d killed two people was also a well-known anti-violence crusader with the group United Playaz, a vocal advocate to get SF Juvenile Hall closed, and even got Supervisor Hillary Ronen to write him a favorable letter to get his sentencing reduced from a prior carjacking conviction.

But 25-year-old Fernando Madrigal was leading a double life as an anti-violence advocate and a gang member, until he was arrested in 2020 for the murder of 15-year-old Day’von Hann. For that and another separate murder, Madrigal was sentenced to 33 years in prison Thursday, according to an announcement from the US District Attorney’s Office of Northern California.  

But things got even more highly unusual after Madrigal’s sentencing, as the Chronicle reports a fight broke out in the hallway of the courtroom. The fight was reportedly between Madrigal’s friends and supporters and Hann’s family.

“Some woman on the other side said, ‘Fuck you and what you’re going through,’ and it was on,” Hann’s mother Sha’ray Johnson told the Chronicle. The Chron also describes that “federal security officers and marshals quelled the fighting and both sides were dispatched separately to elevators.”

In the case of the 2019 killing of the teen Day’von Hann, Madrigal had apparently mistaken the innocent Hann for a rival gang member. According to the US Attorney’s Office, “Madrigal admitted he committed these two murders in part to earn respect from other SFMD Norteños and to enhance his status in the gang.”

Yes, that’s two murders. The previous murder was the 2018 killing of Luis Garcia, whom Madrigal lured to Candlestick Park saying he wanted to buy some marijuana from Garcia, but instead just shot him and stole the weed. Per the the US Attorney, “Madrigal admitted he shot and killed the victim, disposed of the victim’s cell phone on or near the San Mateo Bridge, and dumped the victim’s body in the Oakland Hills, where it was found more than a year later.”

Two of Madrigal’s gang accomplices were also sentenced Thursday for a 2018 incident where they shot and killed one man, and shot another woman in the face. Alvaro Reina Cordero (26) and Oscar Guadron Diaz (24) were sentenced to 26 years in Cordero’s case, and 21 years in Guadron Diaz’s case.

Related: Alleged Gang Member Arrested In July 2019 Murder Was Youth Activist Who Campaigned to Close Juvenile Hall [SFist]

Image: San Francisco Court House Federal building entrance with American flag (Getty Images)

A police officer was injured and one person was apparently arrested, following a huge, chaotic fight at downtown's Westfield San Francisco Centre Sunday evening, as Pride festivities were winding down.

NBC Bay Area reports that police received multiple calls reporting fights at the mall, which is located at the corner of Fifth and Market Streets, at 6:45 p.m. Sunday.

According to KRON 4, the brawl was actually "a number of fights" all at once. The first officers to arrive called for backup, San Francisco Police Department spokesperson Officer Robert Rueca tells KRON 4. "Officers tried to detain several people and some resisted," KRON reports, and "police had objects thrown at them and were attacked by the crowd."

The resistance of the crowd "did complicate matters, " Rueca told NBC, "and that's why we did have to stop the situation as soon as possible and that's why you see us moving to multiple levels in order to stop and detain these individuals that were involved in this incident,"

A police officer was pepper-sprayed during the confrontation, NBC Bay Area reports, and suffered minor injuries as a result of the attack.

In an effort to control the melee, the mall was closed, ABC 7 reports.

The Chron reports that a single, juvenile suspect was detained by police following the clash, which "started between about two dozen people in the food court and grew from there," a police official tells NBC. KRON 4 reports that police are still investigating what might have started the brawl.

Previously: Security Guards Thwart Armed Creepy Clown Shenanigans At Market Street's Westfield Centre

A resident of San Francisco's Chinatown was rushed to an area hospital with life-threatening injuries Monday, after an altercation with a neighbor turned violent.

Police say that the fight began at around 11:30 a.m. Monday, when the 63-year-old female victim was washing dishes in the common area of a building on the 800 block of Clay Street, which is between Stockton and Grant Streets.

According to the San Francisco Police Department, her 67-year-old neighbor suddenly approached her from behind, and "grabbed her."

As the two women wrestled, the aggressor hit the victim with an "unknown metal object" that was later identified as the handle to a frying pan, police say.

The suspect also "jumped on" the woman, hit her "repeatedly," and choked the victim causing her "to pass out for [an] unknown period of time."

Following the attack, the victim was transported to San Francisco General Hospital, for treatment of injuries police say are life-threatening. The suspect was taken into custody, police say, and was booked into San Francisco County Jail.

Women's bantamweight Leslie Smith, 32, reportedly turned the tables on a man who allegedly groped her friend outside a San Francisco bar this past Saturday.

Smith's coach, Cesar Gracie, writes in a post to Facebook that a "dirtbag" groped her friend but "what he didn't know was that [two] of the women were MMA fighters currently in the UFC."

Smith tells the website MMA Fighting that she was about to head into The Mint when a man passed behind her group and groped one of her friends.

"I followed him and I was like, 'Hey, you can't do that,'" said Smith. "And he was like, 'I can do whatever I want.' And I was like, 'No, you can't.' Then he turned around and spit on me and threw a big right hand."

The post, which was first flagged by MMA Fighting, includes a blow-by-blow of the events.

Smith runs self-defense seminars at Gracie's gym and reportedly considers herself a pacifist when she isn't actively competing. The incident, then, sounds like a departure for a woman nicknamed "The Peacemaker."

"It's happened to me before," said Smith. "I don't think I know a single woman who hasn't been in a situation where there was a dude who came too close to her and violated her personal space. It's a situation where if a dude did that to another dude, there would be a fight. That wouldn't happen in the first place. When I saw people reacting to it so happily, I was like, OK we can share it. Let's share it."

A man was critically injured after he was shoved in front of an oncoming train during a fight on a Muni platform Sunday night.

San Francisco Police Department spokesperson Officer Grace Gatpandan says that officers were called to Civic Center Station at 9:01 Sunday night on reports that two men were involved in a physical altercation that took an increasingly violent turn.

Witnesses said that the men were fighting on the station's Muni platform when one pushed the other into an oncoming light-rail vehicle.

A fire dispatcher who spoke with Bay City News said the man was able to pull himself off the Muni tracks, but Gatpandan says he was still left with "a serious head injury," and was transported to San Francisco General Hospital "with life threatening injuries."

His alleged pusher fled the scene, Gatpandan says, and no arrests have been made.

Most Muni station platforms are equipped with extensive surveillance systems, and though Gatpandan did not have any information on footage from the incident at publication time, it's reasonable to assume that police will be pulling video from those cameras in an effort to identify the suspect.

A sharp-toothed attacker remains on the loose in San Francisco, after a man who bit off another man's finger fled following an early-morning Mission Street brawl.

It was around 1 a.m. Tuesday when two men started fighting on Mission Street just south of Caesar Chavez Street.

During the altercation, a man in his 20s or 30s whom we'll refer to as "the biter" chomped off the right index finger of a 27-year-old man we'll refer to as "the bitee," Bay City News reports via CBS5.

"The fight is believed to have escalated from an argument outside a bar, and alcohol may have been involved," San Francisco Police Department spokesperson Officer Grace Gatpandan understates to the Ex.

Following the altercation, the biter fled the scene. He hasn't been spotted since, according to police.

The bitee was transported to San Francisco General Hospital to be treated for his injuries, which (obviously) aren't life-threatening.

Reports differ regarding the matter of the severed finger: KRON4 says that "The finger was recovered, but was not able to be reattached," while the Ex says that the digit "was not recovered." A call to SFPD to determine which of this accounts is correct had not been returned at publication time.

Two Hayward brothers were arrested today after getting into an alcohol-induced fight with each other. Being brothers who fight, one of them employed the use of creative weaponry — specifically, a weed-whacker. (I bet it was the younger one. The younger one, speaking from experience, always goes in for the kill using the most creative yet dastardly force.)

Bay Area News Group/Oakland Tribune has more:

Officers were called at 12:06 a.m. to the 200 block of Cooper Way after a woman called 911 to report her children were fighting, said Sgt. Mark Ormsby.

When police arrived at the home, just a few blocks south of Tennyson Park, they found two brothers outside the house on the curb, Ormsby said.

Phillip Roman Ramirez, 21, reportedly grabbed a weed whacker and had threatened his brother Thomas Garcia Ramirez, 24, during an argument, according to police.

In response, the older brother grabbed a knife and allegedly stabbed his sibling in the wrist.

See, it was the younger one! I knew it! We do crazy shit like that, us younger brothers of the world. (Flashback: When I was a wispy ten years of age, I once gently tossed ["violently hurled," according to mom] a TV set at my older brother in the middle of a nasty fight. Instead of hitting him in the head, like it was supposed to do, the TV went through our bedroom window. Everything smashed to bits. Shards of glass and plastic and antennae everywhere. Both of us grounded for life. Point being: I won. It was his TV.)

Anyway, Thomas was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon and resisting arrest, while Phillip totally didn't do anything wrong, mom! was arrested on suspicion of public intoxication and a probation violation.

[Oakland Tribune]

After the Seahawks beat the 49ers 23-17 to win the NFC Championship Game, cornerback Richard Sherman went nuts on Michael Crabtree during an interview with Erin Andrews. Why? Something about hurt feelings and football. Like a page torn from a Real Housewives script, tension between the two noted players had been brewing since a charity event last summer.

"Sherman has been upset with Crabtree since last summer. Both attended Arizona star receiver Larry Fitzgerald's charity event. While there, Sherman went to shake Crabtree's hand, and Crabtree tried to start a fight, according to Sherman's older brother, Branton.

"I'm going to make a play and embarrass him," Richard Sherman vowed that day.

During an interview with ESPN, Sherman hinted at the drama:

"He said something personal face-to-face," Sherman said. "He knows what he said, and he knows I'm going to be tough on him the rest of his career."

Later, after the Niners lost, Crabtree took to Twitter to vent, saying:

Though not directly responding to Crabtree, Sherman also went off on Twitter:

Also fanning the flames of the Sherman-Crabtree saga, Crabtree did this to the noted cornerback with 30 seconds left one on first-and-10:

So, did Sherman go too far with his response? No. Because it was entertaining. (I've watched it five times so far this morning.) Plus, he's a smart guy, one who's exceptionally self-aware. What he has to say is, so far, thrilling. You should be listening. And as Deadspin's Samer Kalaf said, "Save your stale, old-fart whining about 'class.' It can't be called arrogance when the talk's backed up."

Seattle takes on Denver in the Super Bowl on Sunday, February 2.

[Gif via Deadspin]