People ran around screaming. A huge crowd ran down the sidewalk and through the street, regardless of traffic. A cloud of smoke filled the air. Fire seemed to burn in my eyes, lungs and throat. A girl a few feet in front of me bent over and started to vomit. Somebody screamed, “They’re coming!” They were talking about the police, of course.

Saturday night and early Sunday morning were a spectacle and an event I will surely not experience again any time soon. Regardless of the cause (some say the cops had begun to pepper-spray people on Welch who had nothing to do with attacking the cops, others say it was for a party getting busted), students were rioting, and police were responding with pepper spray and tear gas.

I tried to see what was going on by getting onto Welch Avenue, but I was stopped by a Veishea security guard. We saw people running toward the corner of Welch Avenue and Lincoln Way and followed them instead. Police in full riot gear had pushed the angry crowd to the middle of the intersection and were holding rioters back with threats and pepper spray to the face. More and more people were streaming to the intersection to what was going on. They had heard about some sort of commotion and went to see what it was.

As the crowd grew, the people became bolder. Cans, bottles, rocks and trash sailed through the air and clattered around the street near the cops, sometimes hitting them. People ran around and jumped; others simply yelled. The whole intersection was shut down by the sheer mass of people. Occasionally the mob began cheering, jeering the police by chanting “Fuck the po-lice!” By the time I got there the crowd had begun to get out of control, and police had started using the gas.

The first time I was hit with tear gas I was outside of People’s Bar and Grill in the middle of the crowd. A canister went skipping across the pavement, sparking and popping, and a sickly white cloud erupted. At first I wasn’t affected and only tried to run away from the sound of the exploding canister — but then the gas hit me. My eyes and nose burned like nothing I’d ever felt before. I was crying full tears and staggering down the sidewalk trying to escape the choking fumes, doubled over and nearly puking.

On all sides of me, people screamed and rushed to get away from the searing cloud. Some people were getting trampled. I overheard somebody try to call an ambulance for the people who were getting hurt, but the emergency response did not send units because the area was under riot control. Simply by observing the riot, I would be gassed a total of six more times over the course of the night.

The police would fire the gas, and the mob would scatter, only to regroup minutes later. Rather than subduing the angry crowd, the tear gas only seemed to anger them. The mob would recover from a blast of tear gas and regroup at the intersection to cheer in defiance of the police. The cops and the mob took turns provoking one another like this for a full 45 minutes before the mob began to get destructive.

Someone broke a fire hydrant, and it nearly flooded the intersection before being turned off. Guys would rush forward with street signs and launch the poles into the open street like missiles. The police pushed the mob north toward the Friley Residence Hall, and the rioters began trashing down there. Groups of guys encircled lightposts and viciously shoved around at the base of the pole till the light on top began to sway dangerously.

Finally the pole collapsed and the light would explode on the street, punctuated by the erupting cheers of the crowd. Someone had started lighting off fireworks in the street, sometimes shooting them off to explode around the feet of the police. Street signs and heavy concrete trash cans littered Lincoln Way, causing cars to swerve around them. A dumpster was lit aflame and left to burn in the middle of the street. I overheard somebody say the windows in Copyworks had been smashed.

Gas and pepper spray were not putting the mob down. The last resort of the police was to simply wait the crowd out. The cops got smart and stopped feeding the angry crowd with aggressive tactics and just stood their ground.

After almost four hours, the crowds began to disappear. However the insanity had begun, the patience of the police finally prevailed.