it happened to flea...: Fresh off the presses, downtown LA skateboard injury

Ok, I told people that I probably wouldn't keep updating this, that at some point I would just drift off, maybe I'm doing that, maybe not. I have a LOT of stuff I've been collecting over the last few months, but I'm also SUPER busy.

Anyway, today I left work about 30 minutes early, trying to catch the slightly earlier train. I didn't get very far, at the subway entrance there were about a dozen or so kids skateboarding and a guy filming them. The were riding on the edge of the subway entrance, a little sketchy since a fall to the right and they would have fallen about 20 feet to the bottom of the escalator area, probably death. The were skateboarding down the marble wall around the entrance and ollieing over a two foot wide railing that was put there, pretty much for kids to ollie over. Good job kids.

That's chris standing with his skate board right before he fell..

When I got there, I noticed a cop car with no cop in it, good job Cop (he actually was really cool and did a good job later in this story), I got in a position where I could shoot some video with the cop car in the foreground and the skaters in the background. I shot for a couple of minutes, wondering if I was going to make my train, then I saw the cop walking up to the guy with the camera, having had plenty of bad experiences with cops and cameras, I turned it off and tried to move around behind the camera guy and the cop for a better angle where I wouldn't stand out and get a HELICOPTER CALLED ON ME AGAIN. Just as the cop started to tell the guy to stop, a kid named chris took off down the wall, ollied the rail and WHAM, smacked his head. The cop immediately headed over to the kid, his friends had all rushed to him, I started to head over and thats when I noticed that he was convulsing. His friends were trying to hold him down, trying to hold his head etc, bad idea. The cop got the kids off of him and did exactly the right thing, he kept him from hitting his head.

Shortly there after, the purple shirt people showed up and acted like jackasses, the cops were all pretty cool, I showed one of the bike people my press pass and he still tried to shove me out of the way, I showed it to the cop and he was fine so they mostly left me alone after that.

His friend were obviously concerned for chris, they tried to talk to him and to help but were of course asked to back up, bad deal for everybody. When the paramedics rolled up, chris started fighting them, they ended up having to tie him to the backboard with some thick bandge, this process seemed ineffective and looked comical.