There are two sides to every story, but a lot of the time, the first narrative is the one that sticks.
Case in point: last week, an altercation broke out during one of the weekly neighborhood rides organized by the Broad Street Bullies. The ride has happened every Thursday for years and has become a flashpoint between supporters who see a community ride bringing together people of all ages, including families and children, and critics who see it as a nuisance that holds up traffic, takes over city streets and causes dangerous situations for both riders and drivers.
So when news hit that a confrontation between a driver and the cyclists ended with the driver allegedly being strangled, sides were quickly taken. And with the portion of the video shown on the news, along with the fact that one of the cyclists was being sought for questioning, the initial coverage tilted the narrative heavily in one direction.
But there was another side of the story that hadn’t been heard.
According to the group, the driver had been provoking riders for several blocks before the video shown on the news began. He was nudging riders at the back of the ride and eventually made contact with a BSB field marshal with his vehicle, who responded by calling out the driver. A field marshal is there to help move the ride along and, if needed, protect the riders. When the driver decided to get out of his car and confront the female field marshal, things got physical.
By the end of it, several riders had gotten involved after the driver punched the female field marshal, sending her to the hospital with a broken orbital bone and leaving the driver in a headlock.
So what actually happened?
We spoke with Salad, who founded the Broad Street Bullies to hear their side of what happened and why he believes the initial coverage got the story wrong.
“We ride every Thursday. It’s been going on for years. We do the same route,” Salad said. “At the beginning of the ride, we let everyone know what’s going on and tell everyone to be safe. We have bike marshals who look out for the less advanced riders and the kids. We just go for a ride. It’s an hour. We’re all from the community, so we’re all trying to look out for the community.”
That Thursday started like most others, but according to Salad, there were signs of trouble before the confrontation captured on video. “He was behind us,” Salad said. “This is probably like 8:30 on Cary Street. We get to Harrison [and Franklin Street], where we stop for the light every time, probably for like two cycles. So we weren’t blocking the street like the news said we were. We were just waiting for the red light.”
Salad’s account that the confrontation had been building for several blocks is supported by at least one apparent eyewitness who commented on the news coverage. The woman said she was having dinner at Brazen when she noticed the truck following the cyclists. “The driver was tailing behind that cyclist the entire time and almost hit the cyclist twice from what I saw,” she wrote.
“Traffic was stopped and he deliberately stopped as close to the cyclist as possible and tried to keep inching closer while honking at them,” she wrote. “I had a weird gut feeling something was going to happen.”
She emphasized that what she witnessed happened before the portion captured in the video that circulated afterward. “I personally witnessed the driver deliberately tailing the cyclist and repeatedly honking from blocks up the road, well before where this video takes place,” she wrote. “The truck driver was already driving aggressively and intentionally escalating the situation before this video even started.”
By the time the group reached the light, Salad says words were exchanged between the driver and cyclists. “Everyone on the ride was just like, dude, go left,” he said. “The car in front of him went left on the video of the news report. He could have done that. He didn’t want to do that.”
Instead, the driver got out of his vehicle.
“Words were exchanged, and he decided to hop out and charge one of our marshals, who’s a woman,” Salad said. “She defended herself by pushing him away. And then what did he do after that? He punched her in the eye and broke her eye socket.”
Other cyclists then intervened.
“People that don’t even know her were like, hey, we’re all together. We’re gonna defend this girl,” Salad said. “They’re just trying to get this guy off of her. It turned into a tussle, and it looks like we just decided to beat up some kid, or just six on one. But no, he was putting up a fight, and people just did what they had to do to get him off.”
Salad doesn’t dispute that the driver was eventually put into a headlock. What he disputes is the way that was characterized in the initial reports. “I mean, strangled? He got put in a headlock, yeah, because he was just raging and wouldn’t leave,” Salad said. “I don’t know what else anyone would do. Let’s say you’re on the ride and you have your kid next to you, and some dude is trying to run you guys over, then he gets out and starts trying to fight people. You’re gonna have to subdue this guy.”
Salad says what he saw wasn’t riders trying to seriously hurt the driver. “No one that I saw was really trying to hurt him. They were just trying to get him to stop and leave,” he said. “There were some pretty big guys riding with us that clearly could have hurt that guy. I wouldn’t know what else to do. Put him in a headlock.”
And that’s where Salad takes issue with one word in particular.
“Strangled is a crazy word.”
Meanwhile, he says, the female marshal was the one headed to the hospital. “Now our friend has a broken eye socket and needs to go to the hospital,” Salad said. “She gets there, and the guy had already pressed charges. They didn’t arrest her like the news said, they just wrote her a summons. But she’s in the hospital, concussed, and they’re trying to interview her.”
RVA Magazine reached out to the injured marshal about the incident, but she declined to speak with any media while she waits to consult with her attorney.
For Salad, that’s part of why the initial narrative bothered him so much. “It’s painted out like we’re just terrorizing our community just because some cars have to wait for a second,” he said. “That’s not what we’re about.”
According to the initial account of the incident, someone spit on the driver or his vehicle before the physical confrontation. “I’m not sure about that,” Salad said.
Salad says the confrontation ended pretty quickly after that. “From the video I saw, he was put in the headlock. I guess he got up, and then people just started to leave,” Salad said. “He got pushed away, and I guess he got back in his truck or something. But we had already left. I didn’t really find out what was going on until like 15 minutes later because I was at the front.”
Police were eventually called, but Salad says the ride had already moved on by then. What bothered him was how quickly the story became, in his view, one of a group of cyclists attacking a driver. “I think they just try to paint it as like, some kid, first week of school back, angry mob beats him up,” Salad said. “No, that’s not what happened.”
From his perspective, the entire confrontation could have been avoided. “This kid went out of his way to cause this,” he said. “It was just completely unnecessary.”
Then there’s the cyclist whose face subsequently appeared in news reports as someone police wanted to identify.
Salad questions why that particular rider was singled out. “There were other people in the video, but for some reason they only went after this guy. I wonder why,” Salad said. “The kid was white that got out of his truck, and that guy is brown. He’s Hispanic. It’s kind of crazy.”
“I think he was the closest to her when the guy punched her,” he said. “She immediately started bleeding. This dude is just not backing up, so he just got him off of her, like anyone else would.”
“Now he’s just got his face plastered all over the news just for defending a woman,” Salad said.
UPDATE: About 20 minutes before publication, VCU Police released an image of a second person of interest they are seeking in connection with the incident. Police say the investigation remains ongoing.
And again, Salad comes back to his belief that none of this needed to happen. “He could have just not gotten out of his car, or he could have just turned left,” Salad said. “Completely avoidable.”
As for the marshal, Salad says she was doing what she was there to do. “She’s gonna say something because she’s protecting the ride,” he said. “She’s not gonna try to pull you out of your car or hit you or anything like that. She’s just like, look, there’s kids in front of me. I’m just making sure you don’t run them over.”
All of this will ultimately have to work its way through the legal system but the reaction to the incident says something about the place the Broad Street Bullies occupy in Richmond. People have strong opinions about them, and Salad knows it.
“The wheelies, that’s just a fraction of it,” he said. “I think they really get heated because they don’t know how to ride bikes. They are angry, impatient people.”
Salad says he’s watched people show up to a Thursday ride with one idea about the Bullies and leave with another. “I’ve seen it happen. People that were scared to ride with us, they came out for one ride and they come up to me after the ride like, ‘Hey Sal, let me just tell you, I had this completely twisted notion of how you guys were.'”
Sometimes, he says, what they find has very little to do with bikes. “It was life changing for me to come out and ride because I saw my high school friend who I haven’t seen in 20 years, or I got a job offer from some guy, or whatever it is,” Salad said, describing what riders have told him. “They really appreciate it.”
It’s also why he gets frustrated with some of the criticism he sees online. “It’s easy for people to be what we call keyboard warriors, like Reddit and whatever, Nextdoor,” he said.
And Salad points out that large groups of people riding bikes through Richmond streets aren’t exactly something the Broad Street Bullies invented. “If you’ve ever been to Richmond, like Slaughterama, Best Friends Day, all that, people have been riding bikes in big groups for years, like 20-plus years,” he said. “It’s not like it’s just a bunch of kids doing this,” Salad said. “We do stuff in the community. We do a lot of community events, toy drives, whatever. There’s adults, there’s people’s grandmas, and even little kids, like under 10.”
When I asked Salad what the Broad Street Bullies are actually about, his answer was pretty simple. “Just about community. Riding bikes and art and music and anything else that we come together and do,” he said. “We’ve done a lot over the years. Giving bikes away, we’ve gotten bikes back for people that got stolen, throwing shows. We’re just trying to help people out, maybe just change some lives. We have a spotlight on us, so it’s cool to shine that spotlight on other people that deserve it or wouldn’t really have the chance to get that.”
That community is also why Salad says organizers try to police their own rides. Random people show up on mopeds, dirt bikes and bicycles, and not everybody necessarily represents what BSB is trying to do. “We always make them either go to the back or leave,” Salad said. “If you’re on a bike and you’re clearly not representing what we’re doing, we’re gonna make you leave. We’ve kicked a lot of people out of the ride. We keep it a safe space,” he continued. “We want everyone to be welcome. As long as you’re a good person, it doesn’t matter what you look like. Everyone’s welcome as long as you’re there on the ride to have the best time.”
For Salad, though, there’s another reason these large rides matter. Riding a bicycle through Richmond traffic alone can still be intimidating.
“I grew up outside of the city, and I was never really allowed to come downtown,” he said. “I could only imagine how it would be growing up right now and being able to bike around the street with a big group of people.”
Even with his experience on a bike, Salad says riding Richmond streets alone requires constantly watching what’s happening around him. “Even if I try to do that by myself, I have to look over my shoulder every two seconds,” he said. “I’m very advanced on my bike, but other people are not. Drivers are terrible around here, and we’ve had our friends killed or seriously injured by cars.”
That’s where the size of the Thursday ride becomes the point rather than the problem. “That’s why we want to give people the chance to just ride around the city, even if it’s just for an hour,” Salad said. “They know that we’re looking out for people. You should be able to bike around any street in the Richmond metro area without feeling like you’re gonna get killed by some car.”
After everything that happened last week, Salad admits he briefly wondered whether the Thursday rides needed to stop. “It’s crazy because I thought about it. I was like, ‘Is this the end? Do we have to chill?'”
Then he started seeing the response from people outside his immediate circle. “Seeing the community support was very shocking to me,” Salad said. “Even though I knew my friends supported it, just seeing random people that are like, ‘I don’t even ride bikes, but there’s nothing wrong with this.'”
So the Broad Street Bullies aren’t stopping.
“We’re gonna keep riding, just keep doing our thing,” Salad said. “Just try to stay safer. Try to let people know, just watch out more for each other and just have cooler heads. We don’t want people getting angry at the minor car honk or something. Just let it go.”
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