Restaurant owner trapped by Vancouver rioters: ‘They looked like zombies’

A Vancouver business owner who was trapped in his downtown restaurant with family members during the Stanley Cup Riot said the experience was like being in a zombie movie, as crazed people bent on destruction stormed the premises, broke furniture and would not listen to reason.

After first defending themselves with overturned tables, Francesco Caligiuri, manager of Da Gino Ristorante Italiano, finally was forced to flee to a back storage room with his wife, father, sister and daughter, plus half a dozen employees. He called the experience “Attack of the Zombies.”

“They looked like zombies,” he said. “It was surreal. I never would have guessed that would have happened. There was confusion, disbelief and fear. At one point we decided it was our lives. It’s not the restaurant anymore,” he said.

Caligiuri, 27, endured hours of attacks inside the family-owned business.

“Some of them were really scared. My wife was scared I was going to get hurt, but it was hard to watch without doing something. My mom was screaming and crying and yelling. I had no feeling. It was adrenalin and trying to protect my family,” he said.

The rioters had crazed, angry faces and were bent on destruction.

“No matter how much I yelled at them to go home, they weren’t listening,” he said.

John Tauer, a physiology professor at the University of St. Thomas and coach of the men’s basketball team, weighed in the day after the riot by noting that the larger the crowd is, the more people tend to feel less accountable for their actions. Mob mentality can make some people actually behave like movie zombies.

“Instead of being an individual — or feeling like an individual, we feel part of the mob and usually, that’s when normal moral restraints relax and people feel less accountable for their behavior,” Tauer said.

Tauer says there are many factors that create a mob mentality — though emotion and alcohol do top the list.

Indeed, a handful of rioters who were arrested or turned themselves in later told the press things like “That’s out of character for me,” or “I can’t believe I did that.” In some cases that may be sincere, although I think it’s more a case of opportunity revealing true nature. In a Los Angeles Times article, columnist Bobby Brooks breaks down the three chief contributing factors to the riot thusly: Emotion contagion (the emotion that triggers the drowd, i.e. the Canucks losing); Deindividuation (Identifying with a sports team to lose sense of self and engage in group think); and bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility (People think to themselves “someone else will step in” and, ironically, this leads to everybody doing nothing to stop whatever social norms/laws are being broken).

I blame booze.

But some are asking a more direct question: Are we raising a generation of morons? Would this have happened 20 years ago? Most of the rioters were in their teens and 20s. Are kids just stupider than ever before?

Remember the final scene in the film Shawn of the Dead? Shawn keeps his friend, who has become a zombie, in a shed in the backyard, where he visits occasionally to play video games with him. I think that, psychologically, most of us have that zombie in the backyard shed. And all it takes is the right set of circumstances to let him out.

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Vancouver Riots Highlight Mob Mentality [MyFox Twin Cities]
Vancouver Riot: Psychology (Not Hooligans) Responsible for the Chaos [Los Angeles Times]
Man recalls horror as rioters lay siege to family restaurant [The Province]