” When the weather gets warm, college students come out to party. It’s been the rule of thumb for decades, and the University of Akron was no exception this year. Sumner Fest began at noon this past Friday and the street was cleared out by police officers about 12 hours later.”
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When the weather gets warm, college students come out to party.

It’s been the rule of thumb for decades, and the University of Akron was no exception this year.

Sumner Fest began at noon this past Friday and the street was cleared out by police officers about 12 hours later.

Sam Beall, a student, was the main organizer.

With the intentions of providing students and community members with a chance to come together and have a fun time, Beall was aware of the risks that came along with organizing Sumner Fest.

He created the Facebook group for Sumner Fest a few weeks ago and deleted it at 11:59 a.m. on Friday, as he did last year.

Maybe that will become tradition, too, he joked.

By 4 p.m. there were a couple hundred people on Sumner Street. The band Empty Set performed in Bealls front yard, along with artist Joey P.

Two slip n’ slides were set up but remained unused, despite the nice weather.

However, people enjoyed playing cornhole and socializing. A Red Bull van also drove through the street a couple of times.

Beall grilled hot dogs and handed them out to students and community members.

I’m impressed with the responsibility he took, said Adam Kieffer, regarding Beall.

It’s good that he tried to go about it in a smart way.

Kieffer added that a big problem he noticed were people getting pushed into the street instead of staying in a house or yard.

It seems that if you don’t personally know someone who lives on Sumner, you just have to hang out on the sidewalk or street, he explained.

Aware of the time conflict involving Sumner Fest and Relay for Life, Beall explained that since Relay for Life didn’t start until 6 p.m., he was hoping that students participating in that could enjoy Sumner Fest for a few hours beforehand.

Things remained relatively tame throughout most of the day.

However, by 10 p.m., there had been a few arrests for open container and one for public urination.

There had also been one neighbor complaint. They called because a person was urinating on their house.

Captain Jim Weber of the University of Akron Police Department said that the biggest problems they had been witnessing were open container and underage consumption.

At one point, when an officer discovered that a person drinking alcohol was underage, the officer had the person pour out the rest of his beers before arresting him.

Weber said that there were between 25 and 28 police officers from the University of Akron Police Department and the Akron Police Department at Sumner Fest.

We expect something like this every year when the weather gets nice, regardless of whether it’s planned like this or not, he explained.

Officers began asking houses to turn their music down around 10:30 p.m. Around that same time, a fight broke out on the front porch at a house on Sumner Street, near the Bellwood Avenue intersection.

Police were quick to intervene, with approximately four cars and at least one dozen officers there within 10 seconds.

Soon afterwards, another fight broke out in the front yard of a house directly across the street. Police also broke that up quickly.

Many people were getting unruly at that point, and a couple of beer cans were thrown at officers while they were breaking up the fights.

A person walking through the area could hear countless takes on the party. Remarks of it’s like a zoo over here and I can’t believe how crazy this is were heard from people approaching Sumner Street later in the night.

Some bystanders cheered on the fights, while others quickly walked away to a calmer area of the street.

Michael McCleary, who plans on attending the University of Akron in the fall, recently moved to Akron from Pittsburgh.

I like Akron. This is an awesome experience! he said, looking out into the congested street from the sidewalk.

By 11 p.m., there was tension in the air as police officers blocked off Sumner Street and Wheeler Street with a few cars and stood around them.

Students turned their music down or off and moved towards houses as officers continually warned people not to linger on the sidewalk or street.

By about midnight, officers officially began clearing students out of Sumner Street or into houses. Beall tried to move the process along by appearing on a front porch with a mega phone telling the crowd to leave the premises and clear out Sumner Street.

By 12:30 a.m., Sumner was almost empty as police stood at the intersections of Wheeler and Sumner, and Bellwood and Sumner, blocking off the area where most of the partying took place.

People dispersed and scattered to other houses and parties surrounding Sumner. Countless people were wandering around the neighborhood until early in the morning, many with cases of beer over their shoulders, in search of other parties, which weren’t difficult to find.

Many residents of Sumner who participated in the party Friday night cleaned up the street throughout the day on Saturday.

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