by Leslie Layton
posted Feb. 28
When Colleen Evans stopped by the Feb. 17 “Not my Presidents Day” protest at City Plaza, she hoped to voice her opposition to the Trump Administration and find camaraderie with like-minded people.
Instead, the Chico woman, who was wearing a knee brace to protect a broken kneecap, ended up at the Enloe Medical Center emergency room with new injuries. She arrived at Enloe bloodied, sore and dazed after a disastrous fall off the sidewalk on the east side of the plaza.
Two weeks later, a Chico Police Department investigation has left many questions unresolved, and Evans, 70, is recovering but frustrated that her story hasn’t been told.
Evans and several witnesses said she was forcefully shoved off the sidewalk. The man who was said to have done the shoving, Danny Peters, said he was the victim and not responsible for her fall. Both their accounts differ from the account Chico PD provided.
The story as told by Evans:
Evans was walking through the plaza and saw a cardboard cutout facing Main Street. It was leaning against a lamp post, not far from where one or two pro-Trump demonstrators stood, and she was unsure to whom it belonged. She picked it up to turn it around – was it Trump or Elon Musk she wondered – in order to snap a photo.
She heard screaming. She panicked, thinking she might get caught in the middle of something. “I was healing from a broken kneecap and the last thing I wanted was [to be in the middle of] an altercation,” she says.
“Now I’m just intent on getting out of there,” Evans recalled. “I didn’t know the yelling was about me. I dropped the sign, and the next thing I know [I feel] a forceful shove. I came down on my head and face. When I came to, I didn’t know where I was. I picked my head up and there was blood.”
Enloe told her she had suffered a concussion. She had received a forehead bump, a “huge contusion” on her upper lip, bruising to her neck and right arm, sore ribs and torn ligaments.
Evans said the Chico police officer who interviewed her seemed not to believe her account. “Chico PD was so adamant about me changing my story to fit their narrative,” Evans said.
Evans said the officer told her that “there’s video evidence of me attacking him and I need to recant my story.” The interviewing officer approached her in the hallway at the ER – where she lay on a gurney for seven hours after her fall – and gave her “another chance” to recant, she says. She declined; she says she told the story as she recalled it.
The story according to Peters:
Minutes after Evans’s fall, Peters said he had been pushed by a woman and “smacked on the head” with a flagpole by a second woman after Woman #1 “grabbed my cardboard cutout” of President Donald Trump and took off with it. “I don’t have a chance with these friggin’ people,” he said.
As Peters tried to retrieve the cutout, he told reporters that Evans fell from the curb.
The story according to Chico PD via the DA:
Chico PD didn’t respond to a ChicoSol request for comment and forwarded its report to Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey, who spoke with ChicoSol.
Ramsey: Evans approaches Peters and “snatches the cutout from him and walks briskly back to the other folks.” After interviewing Evans, Chico PD reviewed “surveillance video” from a camera across the street, Ramsey said. Based on that it concluded that Peters “goes after her, and in his grabbing for his Trump cutout, his shoulder impacts her shoulder and she goes down.”
But Ramsey, noting that two witnesses told police they saw the shove, added: “There’s a bit of a dispute as to how she ends up on the ground.”
A bystander then struck Peters with her flagpole, Ramsey said. The DA has no plans at this point to press charges against anyone involved.
Anti-Trump protester Susan Dobra witnessed the entire incident. Her account of the shove closely matches the statements given to ChicoSol by at least two other witnesses, and goes like this:
“It was a large stand-alone cutout and he had it standing a few feet to his left,” Dobra told ChicoSol in an emailed statement. “She went up and took it, and it bent in half as she walked away with it. He went after her and pushed her hard from behind, taking the cutout back. It all happened very fast, but that’s what I saw from a few feet away.”
Today’s update: “I’m really upset and I’m still in a lot of pain,” Evans says.
Reflecting on the protest, she added: “I was having a great time, it was a positive event, and I messed the whole thing up. I’m so ashamed for even touching his sign, but there wasn’t even anybody around it, and I just wanted to turn it around to take a picture.
“I’m not a thief. A cardboard cutout of Trump? That’s the last thing I’d want.”
Leslie Layton is editor of ChicoSol.