Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)
Come on a ride along with a Veteran Homicide Detective as the twists and turns of the job suddenly end his career and nearly his life; discover how something wonderful is born out of the Darkness. Embark on the journey from helping people on their worst days, to bringing life, excitement and smiles on their best days.
Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)
Snapshot: Roughnecks Gone Wild!!!
Ever wonder what happens when you mix tough-as-nails oil workers, state pride, and the most innocent of drinks? Welcome to Kenai, Alaska, circa 2006, where a former police officer witnessed the bar fight to end all bar fights.
Picture this: a small fishing town of 7,000 souls where everyone knows everyone's business. When the local oil refineries undergo their "turnaround" maintenance periods, roughnecks from Texas and Louisiana flood in, bringing their southern pride to Alaska's doorstep. The stage is set at the Uptown Motel—the classiest bar in town, with leather chairs and red velvet accents—where Alaskan oil workers sit at one end and their southern counterparts at the other.
What began as typical state rivalry banter ("We're better than you!" "No, we're better!") seemed to settle down after the bartender intervened. The Alaskans, in what they perhaps thought was a humorous peace offering, ordered a round of Shirley Temples for their Texas and Louisiana colleagues. That single gesture—serving grown men working in one of the toughest industries a bright pink, non-alcoholic children's drink—transformed a tentative truce into a full-blown Roadhouse-style brawl.
The officer arrived to find chaos erupting from the bar into the parking lot: bar stools turned weapons, broken pool cues, men crashing into car windshields, and blood everywhere. Despite broken bones, shattered furniture, and complete mayhem, no charges were filed. Everyone simply limped away, keeping the code of what happens at the bar stays at the bar.
Fifteen years later, this remains the most epic bar fight in this officer's career—a perfect storm of masculine pride, regional rivalry, and the unexpected power of a misplaced joke. Have you ever witnessed a small gesture spiral so dramatically out of control? Share your thoughts and join the conversation!
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Ladies and gentlemen, this is a Murders to Music Snapshot, so I'm going to take you all the way back to about 2006. 2006, I was a patrol officer in a small town in Alaska. It's about 25 miles south of Anchorage and that's what I always tell people, but really it's about a three-hour drive around the Kenai Peninsula. Small town called Kenai, about 7,000 people. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody knows the baby daddies of somebody else and who's sleeping with who and who's dating who. And you just kind of share your girlfriends. And that's the kind of town that we lived in. Right, we were good at drinking and partying. That's what we were good at growing up. But now I'm a cop in this city.
Speaker 1:Well, this city's got a couple of things going for it. It has a fishing industry commercial fishing industry, because we're right on the edge of the Cook Inlet and that's where the fish live. It also has an oil production industry. So there's a couple of refineries in our area. Refineries is where that raw gas and oil come in and they get made into crude oil or gasoline or fertilizer, and we have a couple of these plants. Now, these plants are huge, right, they might be a mile long, and these plants employ a lot of people and they have to be running 24-7. So in order to run 24-7, they got multiple shifts, and if you're running something 24-7, ultimately you're going to have to maintenance this thing, and when they do that they call it a turnaround. A turnaround is when they take a period of time and they bring in a lot of extra hired hands, called roughnecks or roustabouts, and these guys spend two weeks or whatever the number is, just completely maintenance, blitzing this refinery. So there's a lot of people on hand that don't live locally. There's a lot of people from other states, other oil industries, and let's talk about some of those states. So you have oil people in Oklahoma, north Dakota, texas, Louisiana. You know what I mean. They're spread out across the US. Alaska is not the only state. It's the best state for oil, but it's not the only state. So we have some roughnecks in town from Texas and Louisiana and they are helping with this refinery project. Well, in a town of 7,000 people, you know, there's not many hotels in town and there's not many hotels worth staying at. So all the local hotels are jam-packed with these people from out of town and the Alaskans obviously live local and they're all kind of sharing the workspace in these refineries.
Speaker 1:It's a Friday night. It's a Friday night that I will never forget. You see, I'm on patrol and we get sent to disturbances and fights and stuff all the time and we occasionally get our occasional bar fight. You turn your lights and sirens on. You drive to the call, they hear the sirens coming, so they all unask the area and run away and by the time you get there there's nobody there to talk to, nobody wants to file a report and life is good. Rarely do you walk into that Donnybrook bar fight where Jimmy is fighting Johnny over Susie and you know they shared the wrong girl and they're getting into this fistfight in the middle of the dance floor. Rarely does that ever happen.
Speaker 1:Usually by the time we get there, unless we happen to stumble into it usually by the time we get there the fight is over, the people are gone and it's a self-correcting problem. Much like 90% of the stuff we do in law enforcement is a self-correcting problem. The car accident will remove itself from the middle of the road. It just will. How many times have you driven down the road and found junked out cars in the middle of the road that are rusted in place? You know what I mean. Fire department, the cat will get itself out of the top of the tree. I have yet to be walking through the forest or a yard and look up and see a cat skeleton 30 feet up in the tree because it died there. These are self-correcting problems, which is typically what your bar fights or your disturbances are.
Speaker 1:But this Friday night we get a disturbance to a bar fight in a very nice bar. If we had one bar in town I was going to go to, it would be this bar and it's called the Uptown Motel. The Uptown Motel is a kind of a sports bar. The chairs are clad in leather, maybe some dark red velvet. It's nice, it's a classy kind of place. If I'm going for a business cocktail drink, it's going to be at this bar. Well, I respond to this bar because there's a report of a bar fight and it's unusual to have a bar fight in this place just because of the clientele. It's usually an upper class clientele.
Speaker 1:Well, I pull up and I do the same thing. Right, I turn on the sirens, I respond to it and I expect everybody to be gone. Man, I was surprised. I pull up and when I pull up into the parking lot. There is a full on Donnybrook.
Speaker 1:Now we're talking a scene from Roadhouse right. Patrick Swayze is out in the middle of the parking lot swinging elbows and throwing people and just Palm Hill, palm Hill, striking them and they're flying backwards, they're going into car windshields. I'm not exaggerating. They are bar stools in the middle of the parking lot that used to be inside the bar. They're now in the parking lot and they're getting used in this fight. There are pool cues being swung around and I'm like me and I think I had a ride along that night uh, one guy and I'm like it's me against you know 15 or 20 people who are brutally fighting in this parking lot. So I hit the siren a couple of times and I uh, I get out, I yell police. People kind of scattered. There are people limping away. There are people with broken fingers, broken hands. There are people with broken fingers, broken hands, broken noses, blood. This is a complete, absolute fight. So I, I, everybody separates.
Speaker 1:I talked to people that, like I, we don't want to do anything. We don't want to do anything. These are people I don't recognize. These are bigger guys, these are like strapping dudes and I'm like man, I don't recognize any of these people. These aren't like locals that I know of some locals, but not many. So I go inside the bar and I do this investigation, because at that time in my life there was no call too small. So I always investigated these things.
Speaker 1:So I go into the bar and figure out what's going on. And here's the way this plays out. Remember that turnaround we were talking about in those roustabouts? And, uh, roughnecks. Well, they were in the bar that night and in the bar there was Alaskan Roughnecks sitting around the bar. It's their bar. Then there were the Texas and Louisiana Roughnecks sitting in the other corner of the bar. Well, like I said a minute ago, alaska is the best state. Guess what Texas and Louisiana think they're the best state. So in the bar there's this feud going on back and forth we're better than you, you're better than us. But now you add some alcohol to that and some bravado with these guys who are out there working all day, and they got something to prove. That's how bar fights actually start.
Speaker 1:So, seeing this coming, the bartender was like hey guys, everybody should relax, let's just get along tonight, don't do anything stupid, and everybody can stay. If not, I'm going to have to ask you to leave. So Alaska and Texas and Louisiana, they all shook hands, made up and agreed to get along. And that's they were. Everything was going to be fine. So they uh, alaska says you know what we're going to order, you guys? A round of drinks on us, just to say we're sorry. So Alaska goes up to the bar and orders the round of drinks and the bartender says you're giving them to those guys. And they all look towards the Texas and Louisianans and you know, seabass is in the corner over there, like yep, I'm Seabass, this is me, bring them to me. So the bartender's like all right. So the bartender brings the round of Shirley Temples over to the Texas and Louisiana folks and passes out these. Well, shirley Temples.
Speaker 1:That is where the fight started and that was the most epic fight of my career bar fight. It stumbled out of the place. There was pictures broken inside bar stools, outside pool cues, broken bones. At the end of the day, everybody kicked everybody's ass and nobody wanted to do anything about it. I walked away without any paper. I've got a story to tell some 15 years later and it's a memory that I will never forget. So I've never had another one add up to that. I've never had anything close and that was a Murders to Music snapshot.
