NEW ORLEANS -- A third Holy Cross student turned himself in to police in connection to a French Quarter fight that left one man in critical condition.
Kyree Curington turned himself in to NOPD Wednesday, joining his classmates Rhett Weidenbacher and Chris Collett. Curington's attorney, Garron Johnson, said the widely circulated video of the fight shows the punches being thrown, but not why the fight started.
In the video, it appears the man standing next to a car on Bourbon is yelling slurs at Curington, a student and football player at Holy Cross High School. Curington and the man get into a fight, and that draws in several people.
Weidenbacher and Collett were arrested shortly after the fight, but Curington turned himself in Wednesday. All three have been booked for battery.
"We believe it's a sad day in society when my client who was doing nothing wrong on that night gets aggressively approached by a grown man which we believe to be a coward and a bigot who is spewing racial slurs towards my client," Garron Johnson, Curington's attorney said.
Johnson says his client and his friends acted in self-defense.
"His friends, as you can see in the video, simply came to protect him defend him,. They're teammates and for these boys to be criminalized defending themselves I just think it's absolutely disturbing," Johnson said.
A lawyer for Weidenbacher has also come out saying the video doesn't show the moments earlier when an unidentified man punched his client in the head.
"One of those guys punched my client in the mouth," David Courcelle said, showing that Weidenbacher was missing two teeth as a result of the punch.
Eyewitness News Legal Analyst Pauline Hardin said finding video of what happened before the fight will be key to the case.
"Police will have to look and find video of the entire incident not just the end of the fight. So I would think that the defense lawyer would try to explain to the District Attorney Office what had occurred before that and show that it was really the fault of the person who was injured," Hardin said.
So far only the three Holy Cross Students have been arrested and charged.