Street Fight

Saturday, 16th June 2007 by

Please note that some or all of the objects mentioned in this post are no longer visible on Google Earth or Google Maps.

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Here in central San Francisco, it seems there's a violent drama unfolding as the Google Street View car passes by. A bit of friendly rough and tumble, or a more serious altercation? You be the judge...

Note: For this post, images that are directly beside each other were captured at exactly the same moment. All images are posted in chronological order.

As the Google car drives down Shrader Street, we can see that there's a guy standing on the sidewalk, wearing a hat and a black jacket, holding his hands behind his back. There also appears to be some building work going on.

In the next frame we can see the black hat dude is currently talking to a guy in a tan jacket.

Then all of a sudden, the guy in the tan jacket seems to take a swing at the guy in the hat!

In the next frame, the guy in the tan jacket has grasped the hat guy round the chest, and is on top of him, seemingly pounding into him! The other guys on site are looking a little shocked.

By the next frame the scuffle is over, but the two men have moved quite a long way down the street in a single frame - perhaps they ran here? It certainly looks like the tan jacket guy is chasing the other guy.

The chase continues as the Google car turns the corner into Hayes Street. Notice that the hat guy is no longer wearing his hat - it was knocked off in the scuffle. He is looking a little worried however.

After that, the tan jacket guy turns back up the street to where he came from, but he's stopped on the way by a woman who seems keen to discuss something with him. Meanwhile, hat guy skulks off down the street.

Tan jacket guy is still talking to the woman, but judging by his body language I'd say he isn't overly keen to continue that conversation. At this very moment, the Google car passes right by the hat guy, affording us a pretty good close up of his profile.

Now you'll have to decide for yourself, but it looks a lot like he has a bleeding nose, right? He's definitely got a sore looking neck, and is that blood above his ear?

There's one more close up shot of the hat guy before the Google car leaves him too far behind, in which we can again see that he's definitely got something on his face...

So, can anybody offer any other explanation of what happened here? Or even better, does anyone recognise any of these people?