The on-field controversy at MetLife Stadium from Sunday has been balanced, at bit, by an off-field controversy that occurred among fans attending the game.
Video taken at the venue shows a male Jets fan punching a female Patriots fan in the face. Police are investigating the incident.
So is the media. According to FOX 5, the man’s name is Kurt Paschke, 38. His mother, Colleen, tells FOX 5 that Kurt was convicted in 1992 of “criminally negligent homicide in the stabbing death of a Long Island teenager.”
Colleen Paschke, who attended the game with her son, essentially admits that he threw the punch on Sunday. But she claims that Kurt was defending himself.
“Yes a guy should not hit a girl or a woman,” Colleen Paschke said, “but if you are going to get a maniac girl how much abuse are you supposed to take before you defend yourself?”
The video shows the girl rushing toward the man as he then punches her in the face. She staggers backward for a step or two, but doesn’t fall.
“He’s very mild-mannered, he does have a past from when he was 17 so he knows that when there is an altercation that you move on, you don’t put yourself in that position,” Colleen Paschke says of her son. “He was concerned for me and for himself also just to keep going and not make something out of it. But they thought otherwise. They were the aggressors.”
The New York Daily News reports that Kurt Paschke served three years in prison for the stabbing death of Henri Ferrer at a pizza parlor in Sayville, Long Island. Ferrer’s parents believe that Paschke got preferential treatment from the judicial system.
“He murdered my son, and he got a minimum sentence for killing a 17-year-old boy,” Robert Ferrer told the Daily News. “He got away with it because his father is a [police] sergeant.”
Said Jocelyne Ferrer of Paschke, “I hope he winds up in jail.”
Regardless of whether Paschke winds up in jail, he’s found himself caught up in a media scrum that likely will continue until the situation is resolved.