Cut to another camera outside the club's exit. At 12:35 a.m., three city police officers, in uniform but working security for Iguana, arrive at the door and go inside. They quickly emerge, and one holds the door open for a security guard seen carrying Troxel outside, holding him by both shoulders, his feet dragging on the ground.
The guard sits Troxel on the sidewalk and puts his arm on his shoulder. Police officers talk with him as his friends gather. One girl sits across from him and holds his hands as he buries his face in his arms.
The video cuts off before the ambulance arrives. Authorities said the man was taken to a local hospital and later transferred to Maryland Shock Trauma Center. Relatives at Troxel's addresses in Hampstead and Glen Burnie did not respond to my inquiries.
Police said at one point he was in a coma, but they said that is no longer the case. A police spokesman said Troxel was intoxicated at the club and was so badly injured he has been unable to speak to detectives. "He has no recollection of what occurred," Agent Donny Moses said.
Moses said the off-duty officers coded the case as an "injured person" and called for an ambulance. Six hours after the attack, an officer wrote a report from Shock Trauma noting the injuries but adding little else. "I was only able to obtain that he was picked up by a medic outside Iguana Cantina," the report says. "It is unknown at this time how Mr. Troxel was injured." Temple said his two security guards who were with the victim and the officer did not mention "that a crime had occurred."
Moses said detectives were later told by Troxel's friends that he had been hit in the face on the dance floor, and then hit several more times in the face after he fell. But the spokesman said two girls who were with Troxel told detectives they "noticed him on the floor" but don't know how he got there.
A police spokesman, who left the office earlier this month, had described Troxel - whose name was first made public this week - as a Towson University student. A school spokeswoman said he is not enrolled there, but that police had asked for help finding students who may have seen Troxel get hurt. She said one student stepped forward.
Police are still reviewing the videotape and trying to determine what happened. The case has been upgraded from an "injured person" to an aggravated assault.
Temple, the club's lawyer, said he wants to put rumors to rest and understand how this case justifies banning off-duty police officers from working security. The officers he hired were outside, as they are supposed to be, and it doesn't appear there was an out-of-control fight inside the bar that the cops missed, ignored or could've prevented.
For Bealefeld, the issue is liability. A young man was critically injured inside a bar that hires off-duty cops to help keep control and that looks bad. He wants the bar owners to take more responsibility.
"These locations have become enormously violent and a threat to public safety, some of them," Bealefeld told the City Council before the ban went into effect Nov. 16. "What the refrain I hear from some of the club owners is, well, Bealefeld, your cops are working security. So if the patrons aren't safe, who's responsible?"
