We’ve received a couple of emails from people who say they watched a woman get arrested early this morning during an impromptu snowball fight outside Wonderland Ballroom in Columbia Heights (at 11th and Kenyon NW). We’re trying to get confirmation from MPD on this.

One of the emails we got describing the incident is below. City Desk has posted another one, which was sent to members of the D.C. Council. All of this of course comes in the context of the infamous gun toting police detective at a December snowball fight at 14th and U Streets NW.

It’s happened again. At approximately 2am this morning, a woman was arrested for throwing a snowball outside of the Wonderland Ballroom at 11th & Kenyon NW shortly after it closed. At closing, the crowd leaving the bar broke into a spontaneous snowball fight. After about 15 minutes, the police arrived. Immediately upon exiting his vehicle, a policeman was hit with a snowball in the left shoulder region. This policeman, an officer Fitts (Badge: 2548), then followed a couple for half a block south on 11th St before deciding that they were not the ones who hit him. Fitts then returned to Wonderland and randomly pulled a woman from the crowd, arresting her. He would not state the charges or the reason why he arrested her. She was put in handcuffs and forced against a police car. Mind you, the officer was hit before the snowball fight had broken up, and when there were at least five snowballs in the air from each side of the street at a given moment. There’s no way he could have singled this woman out as the one who threw the snowball that hit him. A spontaneous cheer of “Let her go” went for a while. They did not let her go. Eventually they took her away. I overheard the policemen saying they would take her to the Third Precinct, though I may have misheard.

In total, there were five cruisers at the intersection. I was able to get names and badge numbers from the four officers who would speak to me: Fitts, as mentioned above, as well as Pittman, Benitz, and Mamdan. I wrote their names and badge numbers on a piece of paper that I then gave to a friend of the woman arrested, so I no longer have all of their badge numbers.

The woman arrested is in her early to mid-twenties.

Full disclosure: I was leaving Wonderland at the time, and I participated in the snowball fight. I do not know the woman who was arrested.

There were several iPhones around, so I hope that photos and video will begin to turn up.