Detective draws gun at Twitter hyped snowball fight in D.C.

A snowball fight on steroids (thanks to Twitter) on a busy street in Washington D.C. took an interesting turn when a cop pulled a gun on some kids for pelting his Hummer during the massive snowstorm yesterday.

Around 200 people are said to have shown up to the web-organized snowball fight, including some with anti-war signs. A plainclothes D.C. police detective was among drivers who were targeted by the snowball bandits, and witnesses say the man exited the vehicle and brandished the gun at the massive crowd. Police say the detective merely exposed the gun to the crowd, but the picture above shows that the gun was indeed drawn at some point.

Washington City Paper has an eyewitness account of the incident from a snowball fight participant named Matthew Bradley:

“An hour ago, we showed up to see a snowball fight already in progress. Two factions along 14th Street along the intersection. It was pretty friendly, mostly OK. At one point, there was one interaction with the police that I saw. A cop got stuck in the snow. People stopped and helped him out. A couple moments later, at the intersection, heading west along U was this big maroon Hummer. A small faction of people decided to target it with snowballs. They’re throwing snowballs at the Hummer. It turns out the driver of the Hummer is a detective. He gets out. He’s waving a walkie talkie. It’s not going well. Then he starts waving a gun. He hadn’t identified himself at this point. There was a point where things cooled off a bit, more police showed up, and he identified himself at that point. The name was Det. Baylor. My guess was B-A-Y-L-O-R.”

Video below shows the detective admitting that he drew his gun. Police say the incident is under investigation.

[Image: Matthew Bradley, Flickr]