By ROBIN SHANNON

L’Observateur

LAPLACE – A LaPlace man was booked with illegal use of a weapon after he fired a gun into the ground during a disturbance in the vicinity of a LaPlace business last weekend.

Reginald Foster, 33, of Richmond Drive, was arrested at the scene by St. John the Baptist Parish sheriff’s deputies who had responded to calls of shots fired in the 8800 block of Richmond Drive in LaPlace around 8:20 p.m. Sunday, said Capt. Dane Clement, spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office.

Clement said when deputies arrived on the scene, a large crowd of people was gathered in the street. The crowd was leaving a party at Airline Athletic Club when a fight broke out in the street involving a group of juveniles throwing unknown objects.

As the deputies began interviewing people in the area and assessing what happened, two more shots were fired nearby and another group of people was seen running from the area where those shots were fired, Clement said. Witnesses identified Foster as the man who fired the shots.

When the deputies questioned Foster, who cooperated with the investigation, he said that he witnessed a group of people hitting a defenseless female subject. He yelled for them to stop, but when they refused he said he fired two shots from his gun into the ground to scare the group away from her. He said that he felt it was the only way to get the group to stop.

Foster was booked into the Sherman Walker Correctional Facility. Clement said he bonded out of jail Monday.