Teenagers wilded out for Buffalo Wild Wings Tuesday after the restaurant chain offered its spicy wings dirt cheap.
High-school students swarmed the Atlantic Center Mall along Flatbush Avenue, which police blame on the forty-cent wings at the Fort Greene restaurant.
The Minneapolis-based restaurant chain advertised the deal to Brooklyn high school students.
“Don’t be alarmed if the tightwad of the bunch picks up the tab,” one advertisement for the special said.
Thousands showed up at the mall Tuesday night, demanding their 40-cent wings, alarming mall-goers. Violence soon followed.
Police say gunfire broke out just after 8 p.m. in two locations following quarrels outside the restaurant.
Two teens were wounded at a shooting at Fulton Street and Flatbush Ave. Another person was stabbed right outside the mall, according to The New York Times,. The teenager’s injuries in the wing-linked-stabbing were not life threatening, the paper reported.
Local
“Although there was a huge police presence at the mall to address the condition and turn the thousands of students away and send them back home, apparently a few rogue groups managed to cause trouble while heading home,” commanding officer of the 88th Precinct in Brooklyn, Capt. Anthony Tasso, said in an e-mail message posted on the Local, a New York Times blog.
Times Web producer Hamilton Boardman, wrote in a post that he heard two shots at around 8:23 p.m. He noticed a crowd of people yelling that someone was shot. Two victims were found 30 feet apart near the intersection of Fulton and South Portland Streets. One victim was shot in the leg.
“The shots were in quick succession, separated by no more than a second, and less if my memory serves me right,” Boardman wrote. “It’s possible that one of the victims had run a bit before falling to the ground.”
Brooklyn Councilwoman Letitia James slammed the chain for its awful planning and management of the sales promotion.
“Falling on the night prior to the Veterans Day school holiday, the restaurant could not accommodate, nor provide proper security for, the crowd of teens that responded to the promotion — geared to middle and high school students,” she said in a statement. “I question the marketing and management of this event, and ask that restaurants and mall management seriously re-evaluate security procedures for highly attended promotions such as the one held yesterday evening.”
An employee for the wings restaurant identified himself as a manager and directed calls to the corporate offices. A phone call to Minneapolis and other locations across the country were not returned to the Times. The Atlantic Center Mall did not return the Times' calls for comment, the paper reported
