Wednesday, February 27, 2008

5 comments:

Mari said...

Is a dude stuck in the dumpster?

Anonymous said...

maybe that trash from SIDELINES. oh wait, they got shut down from the city. hehe.

Anonymous said...

more info from my comment above:
(and alley-blog's longest post to date!)

Sidelines bar's license suspended because of woman's death from alcohol poisoning
Some say bar won't reopen
2008-02-26
By Patrice Relerford and Paul Walsh, Star Tribune Staff Writers [published in The Star Tribune, Minneapolis, MN, 2/26/2008]
At a packed and emotional meeting, the Mankato City Council voted unanimously Monday night to suspend the license of a nightspot where a young woman drank herself to death celebrating her 21st birthday last year.

As a result, the owners of the Sidelines Bar and Grill have to surrender the license today and the bar will be officially out of business for 30 days. Its closing is likely to be indefinite, council members said, because Sidelines has lost its lease and is unlikely to reopen somewhere else.

Among those at the meeting was Jenny Haag of Mayer, Minn., mother of Amanda Jax, the former Minnesota State University, Mankato student who died in October.

Haag declined to comment other than to say she was glad to have Sidelines closed and that her family plans to file a suit against the bar this week. Alan Milavetz, attorney for Jax's family, has said that he believes the bar is "primarily culpable" in Jax's death.

Jax was the first of three young adults to die from binge drinking from October to January in Minnesota college towns.

Jax's blood-alcohol content level was nearly 0.46 percent, nearly six times the legal limit for driving.

Sidelines has had "more violations than any other bar in the city," Council Member Jack Considine said. It hit the "third strike" with Monday's vote, he said, having had its license suspended previously, first for four days, then for six, for violations that include serving underage customers, overserving a customer and allowing patrons to leave the property with alcohol.

City Attorney Eileen Wells' recommendation to the council to suspend the bar's license, outlined Sidelines' missteps since it opened about 18 months ago. It also included a memo on the Jax case that Wells sent last month to police in which she wrote that "the bartender had a duty to stop serving Ms. Jax, to remove any alcoholic beverage from her control, and further prevent any of the other patrons in the bar from providing alcohol to Jax.

"Once Jax passes out," Wells' memo continued, "he not only fails to call for emergency assistance, he actively participates by helping to put Jax into a vehicle."

Sidelines was not open Monday, and its owners and mall executives were unavailable for comment. No one spoke on the bar's behalf at the council meeting.

Earlier Monday, City Council Member Mark Frost said the operator of Mankato Place, the mall where Sidelines is located, intended to evict Sidelines.

"We've got 45 bars in Mankato; they are the bottom feeders," Frost said of Sidelines owners Craig and Adam Blattner. "If you're gonna get in the business, you better know what you're doing. [The owner] apparently doesn't have control over his staff."

Combining the suspension with the eviction effort, Frost hopes, will lead to Sidelines' demise in Mankato. "That's fine," he said. "We don't want his business."

Frost acknowledged that while Jax contributed to her own death, she also "had a lot of help from people who should know better. Now she'll never have a 22nd birthday."

Many college students attended Monday's meeting to express support for closing the bar.

Nicole Neudecker, 21, a junior at Minnesota State University, Mankato, who did not attend the meeting but heard about it shortly afterward, said "It's not that [the City Council was] picking on Sidelines. They broke the rules."

University officials have noticeably picked up efforts to warn students about the dangers of excessive drinking since Jax's death, she said.

Jax, a former pre-nursing student at Minnesota State University, Mankato, died of acute alcohol poisoning after celebrating her 21st birthday in late October. Her blood-alcohol content was nearly 0.46 percent, the medical examiner determined.

She started with a beer or two at a Mankato apartment, then drank more beer at Sidelines, then a whiskey shot, a shot of rum and a cherry schnapps drink that a bartender bought for her, according to the Blue Earth County attorney's office.

When she lay down on a bar stool next to the bartender, he and another person carried her out to a car. By the next morning, Jax was found dead in a friend's apartment.

The county attorney's office declined to file criminal charges in the case against the bar or its employees, saying it could "not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that any particular person was criminally responsible" for the alcohol that was served to Jax.

Wells, in her memo to police, acknowledged the county attorney's decision but added: "There is compelling evidence of a serious lack of attention and direct involvement in the Jax matter to warrant" Sidelines losing its license.

Among the other alcohol-related deaths in Minnesota in recent months:

In mid-December, Winona State University student Jenna Foellmi's body was found in an off-campus apartment in what police called a "classic case of binge drinking." Foellmi, of Brownsville, Minn., died after steadily drinking for more than 12 hours with friends, police said. A blood-alcohol content reading was not released.
In early January, Brian Threet, 20, of Farmington, who was about to reenroll at St. Cloud State University, was found dead after a night of partying and drinking games in St. Cloud. While the release of blood-alcohol test results is pending, police and family suspect alcohol poisoning killed Threet.

Mari said...

Wow, that is some wild stuff.

Anonymous said...

identical dumpster triplets, do your parents know what you've been up to?