Billings Cops In Hot Water After Drunken Brawl Outside Of Bar The Ended With Brain Damage, A Gun Drawn And A Roll Over Crash

About a month ago, Louis Delgado’s Friday night started with a friendly drink at the Grandstand Bar in Billings. It came to a quick and violent end after a stranger kneed his car door.

It was nearly 1 a.m. on Jan. 15, and the stranger was with several other men. Two of the men, including the one who kneed the car, were off-duty law enforcement officers who had been socializing at the bar that evening.

“Words were exchanged,” Billings Police Chief Rich St. John said the next morning.

The chief had called a press conference — on a Saturday — to explain how the parking lot scuffle had escalated to the point of one of the officers being injured and Delgado winding up in a rollover crash that landed him in the hospital for three days.

“It is reported that the driver fired one shot,” St. John said during the press conference.

The whole exchange, both audio and video, was captured on the Grandstand’s security cameras and Delgado, a 24-year-old with a newborn baby, wants everyone to see the video. It was the cops who started the fight, he said, and he never fired his gun.

During the skirmish in the bar parking lot, a friend riding with Delgado was ordered out of the car by one of the men with the cops. After Delgado was punched numerous times through the car window, he sped away. Minutes later, he returned to pick up his friend who by then was gone.

As Delgado pulled away the second time he could see police cars with their lights flashing coming, and he drove off west onto Grand Avenue where he crashed his car, landing upside down in the parking lot of the Albertsons grocery store at 1212 Grand Ave., near 13th Street West.

Delgado may have suffered a traumatic brain injury, and during his time in the hospital he ran up thousands of dollars in medical bills. He still wears a neck brace.