PARTY ENDS IN FIGHT, BUT IT’S NOT SAME OLD STORY

Sam Skolnik, Las Vegas Sun

Saturday, July 14, 2007 | 7:03 a.m.

The post-Super Bowl party fracas involved angry name-calling and drunken fisticuffs, depending on whose story you believed. Even a couple of the fighters' mothers were cursed.

The average age of the combatants? Close to 80.

The tales surrounding the Feb. 4 fight at a Las Vegas seniors home on Jeffreys Street found their way before Justice of the Peace Karen Bennett-Haron on Friday. About a dozen seniors crowded her courtroom, and more than half testified, each spinning a slightly different version of events.

Call it "Rashomon" meets "Grumpy Old Men."

After police were called to the scene, they cited two residents, Edriss Sbai and Henry Giles, with a misdemeanor called affray, which means taking part in a public fight.

The scrap, prosecutors claimed, mostly took place on an elevator as people were leaving the party. Sbai, they claimed, shoved a man named Frank Hyland, ripped his glasses off his face and crushed them in his hand.

Two others corroborated Hyland's testimony, including his girlfriend, Margaret Underwood, who said Sbai pushed and pulled at her for no apparent reason, and later, that Giles came up to her "out of nowhere" and struck her on the side of the head.

Sbai, Giles and a couple of others responded that they saw nothing of the kind, and that Sbai got involved only when he saw another resident, Dwight "Gene" McConaughy, attacked out of the blue by a younger woman who did not live in the facility and was never charged.

No one could say exactly what spurred the hostilities.

"I have to say, this is frivolous, and I'm sorry to waste the court's time," said Ernestine "Nesty" McFarland, testifying for the defense.

Bennett-Haron agreed and dismissed the charges. "I think that everybody has the right to access the justice system, but they don't have the right to abuse it," she said. "I think that's what happened here."

Deputy District Attorney Mandy Krusey declined to comment.

The two groups, including some still eying one another warily, took separate elevators to the courthouse lobby.