Insanity At the Mall

A 2:30 am fight in a mall food court made the early hours of Black Friday pretty interesting:

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department placed a portion of a Cerritos shopping mall on lockdown briefly Friday morning after a fight broke out in the food court.

The lockdown at the Los Cerritos Center was quickly lifted, and mall operations are now back to normal, officials said.

The incident broke out around 2:30 a.m., according to the Sheriff's Department.

The mall had invited shoppers for a special sale event called Midnight Madness. The Los Cerritos Center describe the event this way: "When the clock strikes midnight, Los Cerritos Center will open its doors for the season's craziest night of shopping, with special guest Kari Steele from MYFM 104.3. Stores throughout the center will be open and offering the best deals of the year. Imagine ... all your holiday shopping done before the sun comes up -- now that's insane."

It's insane, alright. As I mentioned last night the line outside the Mission Viejo Toys-R-Us store was probably a quarter mile long right before they opened at 10pm, and people were still pouring in to the parking lot. According to my inside source at the store there was a line outside for several hours since they couldn't let everyone in at once. However, they didn't have any problems with bad behavior and eventually everyone made it into the store.