Twenty-four people have been banned from sailing with Carnival Cruise Lines after a massive brawl broke out among the passengers.
Phone footage of the incident posted to Facebook by an eyewitness showed a large group of people at the terminal in Galveston, Texas, shoving one another and swinging punches.
The melee, which took place over the weekend as passengers queued for customs, eventually spread past a line of safety barriers. At one point a man can be seen being pushed to the ground and pummelled by a group of assailants.
Members of the facility’s security team rushed to intervene while fellow holidaymakers moved out of the way while sidestepping piles of luggage strewn across the floor.
“It went down this morning,” wrote Trelle Ray, who first shared the clip on social media.
The cruise had just returned to the United States after a week touring the western Caribbean, stopping in Mexico and Honduras, when the violence erupted.
“The incident occurred in the debarkation area under the authority of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol,” Carnival explained in a statement to local news outlet KPRC 2.
“The matter was turned over to law enforcement. We will not tolerate such behavior, and 24 people have been placed on our Do Not Sail list.”
Border patrol officials subsequently told KPRC 2 that 10 people had initially been detained but only one man was arrested: Ethan Meritt-Clark, 21, from Chicago, Illinois.
Court records reveal Meritt-Clark said he was debarking from Carnival’s Jubilee ship and picking up his luggage when he noticed a group of people “he had an issue with while on the cruise.”
He told officers he had previously met them a day earlier when they were playing basketball onboard. A fight had broken out during the game.
Meritt-Clark alleged in his affidavit that the group confronted him at the Galveston terminal and started “hitting and stomping” him to the ground.
But the court documents state that he then “recanted his original statement” and instead admitted to pushing an elderly man during the fracas.
Investigators subsequently spoke to the elderly man, who said he had been attempting to intervene to calm the situation and had told Merrit-Clark, “Don’t do what you’re about to do”.
The 21-year-old is reportedly now facing first-degree felony charges for injury to a child, elderly individual or disabled individual and is being held on a $5,000 bond.
