Less than a day after a stampede of fans fled War Memorial Stadium fearing a possible threat, authorities gathered to try to answer one question: What happened?
After hours of reviewing footage and discussing first-person accounts from some of the more than 38,000 people who stormed out of the Salt Bowl game Saturday night, Arkansas State Parks Director Grady Spann said he has yet not been able to find video footage of the fight that reportedly started it all.
Reports of gunfire and possible bomb threats flooded the stadium just after halftime, witness Jessica Ross said, causing fans to rise and run for the stadium's many exits.
Little Rock Police Department spokesman officer Steve Moore said that no evidence of gunshots was found in the stadium, and no one was shot during the melee that reportedly caused the crowd to run.
Instead, the noise people heard was likely that of falling metal barricades, many of which were knocked over during the panic, Moore said.
Spann and park rangers have found no evidence to contradict the police department's statement.
Meg Matthews, spokeswoman for the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism, said Sunday that a security officer confiscated a stun gun from a private individual in the stadium's concourse.
Matthews said the stun gun had been "dry fired," meaning that the metal prongs of the weapon did not make contact with anyone, and that the noise may have been mistaken for gunfire.
"Concurrently, when people started exiting, three metal barriers were knocked over, and it sounded like gunfire," Matthews said.
Spann said he, Salt Bowl committee member Shane Broadway, Arkansas Parks and Tourism Executive Director Kane Webb and law enforcement officers from multiple agencies would be discussing what happened Saturday night and how authorities might better respond in such a situation.
The Salt Bowl, an annual rivalry football game between high school teams in Benton and Bryant, drew in an estimated 38,200 attendees this year.
The Bryant School District said Sunday that as a community, “we will heal together; move forward together.”
“While blue is on one side of the stadium and maroon is on the other, we all are united, the district wrote in a statement, calling the game’s cancelation because of a fight and subsequent panic “unfortunate.”
“Salt Bowl is about community — people coming together to support their neighbors through peanut butter and Goodwill donations and people coming out to the game to support their schools and athletic teams,” Bryant officials added.
Read Monday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.
Information for this article was contributed by Brandon Riddle of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.