There are times you wonder how these people are still on the streets, even given what you know about the streets they’re on. I mean, Los Angeles and California at large has been notorious for decades for ever loosening standards of severity when it comes to criminals and the punishment they receive for their crimes. To the point of it being a minor miracle if they receive any.
That all being said, it’s still quite a jolt when you see something as ghastly happen as this past weekend’s vehicular assault on a sidewalk crowd outside an LA nightclub.
Everyone queued up, waiting to get in, when a car careens around a corner and plows into the throng of folks.
Video shows moment driver plowed into crowd outside East Hollywood nightclub https://t.co/lLCFkZkNuj pic.twitter.com/rZ2N4JrUVd
— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) July 22, 2025
First reports were that, besides the miraculous news that no one had died at the scene, the driver had been shot.
Was that why he crashed? Details were sketchy.
Hours later, it emerged that enraged bystanders pulled the driver out of his vehicle and shot him at the scene, meting out some rough street justice.
I was hoping he hadn’t hit the crowd because he was experiencing a medical emergency, and then got shot to boot.
It turns out maybe the crowd knew more about the scumbag in the car than I did.
Video obtained by TMZ shows the moment a suspect, identified as 29-year-old Fernando Ramirez, rammed his car into a crowd outside an East Hollywood nightclub. The suspect had reportedly been kicked out of the club earlier. @MattGutmanABC reports. pic.twitter.com/2lnQfxJa7Z
— World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) July 22, 2025
Fernando Ramirez had been kicked out of the same club earlier that evening, not once, but twice.
I guess it made him mad.
…Ramirez reportedly had been kicked out of the venue for fighting, then returned was kicked out again for being intoxicated and disruptive, according to police and news reports. He responded, police say, by intentionally driving into a crowd of pedestrians outside the nightclub and colliding with several food carts.
Bystanders pulled Ramirez from his vehicle and attacked him, police said. A man came from across the street, pulled out a firearm and shot Ramirez in the lower back, police said.
The problem with a guy like Ramirez is that he seems to have spent a good portion of his life attacking people all over Southern California with multiple felony convictions as a result. He was still on parole when he decided to try to kill as many people as he could on the sidewalk early Sunday morning.
…Orange County prosecutors confirmed on Monday that Ramirez has an extensive criminal background, including several criminal cases filed against him since 2014.
On June 15, 2019, Ramirez ran up behind a 26-year-old African American grocery store employee and sucker punched him, breaking the employee’s nose and damaging two of his front teeth. A couple witnessed the attack at a Laguna Beach store and called 911.
…That recording led a jury to convict Ramirez of a hate crime on top of felony battery. But an appellate court found that Ramirez’s comments to the officer about his racial motivation for the attack on the grocery store employee were improperly obtained by police after Ramirez had received his Miranda advisement and invoked his right to an attorney. The appellate judges threw out the civil rights conviction and hate crime enhancement. What had been a six-year prison sentence was reduced to four years.
Since then, Ramirez has been arrested multiple times for domestic violence, assault and DUI related allegations.
In 2021, court records show, Ramirez assaulted a woman who was found by deputies lying face up in extreme pain in the Ola Vista and Avenida Rosa intersection in San Clemente. A witness described Ramirez grabbing the woman by her hair, throwing her head first into a cinderblock wall, then dragging her into the street by her hair and throwing her down. A deputy later testified that Ramirez resisted arrest by ignoring police commands, flailing about and being unable or unwilling to walk on his own.
As part of a plea deal, Ramirez’s jail sentence for the assault case was stayed and he was ordered to spend a year on probation and to take part in a batterers’ treatment program and community service. A misdemeanor domestic violence case, also in 2021, led to a 234-day jail sentence, court records show.
In 2020, one of Orange County’s prosecutors had nothing redeeming to say concerning Ramirez.
…An Orange County prosecutor in a sentencing report filed in 2020 — before many of the more recent cases were filed against Ramirez — described an arrest history that included “assaults while in custody, domestic violence, child endangerment, gang-related activity and racial tension in custody. Ramirez, the prosecutor wrote, “has proved to be violent to strangers and family alike and clearly has a lack of concern for the safety of others.”
And yet, there he was, five years later, crashing through bodies on the sidewalk in a fit of pique.
If only that were the end of it, but Ramirez is an ongoing case of unfinished business. He’s still due back in court in Orange County to settle some other violence-related tabs with a judge.
…Kimberly Edds, a spokeswoman for the Orange County district attorney’s office, said Ramirez has a pending driving under the influence charge, and a separate domestic battery charge, including a violation of a protective order stemming from a 2022 incident, also pending in the Orange County courts.
It doesn’t sound as if this creature has ever once contributed to society and yet has received break after break in California’s criminal justice system.
Mayor Karen Bass called the attack ‘a heartbreaking tragedy,’ but it wasn’t so much a tragedy as a travesty.
Fernando Ramirez is the suspect who rammed his vehicle into several people after getting kicked out of an Hollywood nightclub early Saturday morning. Media outlets are refusing to report on whether he’s an illegal or not. Karen Bass calls it an “heartbreaking tragedy”. https://t.co/lKdIxw9KTf
— Shutdown Man (@ShutdownMan) July 20, 2025
Time and again, this monster was sentenced to real time and never served it. Even when a reduced sentence was imposed – four years instead of six – he only actually served a year and a half of it.
Subsequently, when he violently attacked an innocent woman, instead of being packed away for a good, long stretch as a repeat violent offender, he got probation.
That’s an unfathomable travesty and scathing indictment of what progressives have done to the criminal justice system.
The justice for those poor folks on the sidewalk would have been this guy still in prison, and their evening every bit as enjoyable as they’d hoped.
The tragedy is that their elected officials allow the carnage to continue.
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