It was just another Sunday afternoon family trip to their local Walmart until a Utah dad’s restroom break turned into a bruising rumble.
Christopher Adams, a 6-foot-3, 250-pound construction worker from Roy, Utah had gone to the Clinton-based bulk store with his wife Tiffany and his two kids for storage bins and blinds for their windows.
Then he heeded nature’s call at around 2 p.m. from his daughter Emery, 5, and his 7-year-old son Kyler, as first reported by KSL.
“There was a family restroom but with two kids that have to go to the bathroom I just decided we’ll all go to the men’s bathroom and get it done,” Adams told The Daily Beast while he was attending his son’s soccer game Wednesday night.
His daughter was using the stall while his son took care of his business at a urinal.
They were drying their hands with their dad when all of a sudden a heavyset Walmart shopper in his forties started mad dogging Adams.
“He came in and we finished washing our hands and it escalated really fast,” he said.
The stacked hardhat, who had been a stay-at-home-dad while his wife Tiffany pursued a health-care degree, started to get a tongue lashing from the man.
“What the fuck is she doing in here?” the man said, according to Adams. “It is inappropriate that she’s in here.”
Adams said he tried to keep cool.
“I was just like, ‘Wait, what? What is going on?’”
Adams tried to tell the guy to back off.
“I told him ‘Whatever A-hole.’”
Then the guy “instantly snapped,” suckerpunching Adams in the mouth.
“He pushed me and I caught myself and then he punched me in the face,” Adams said. “I took it and then moved him out of the bathroom… He was just exploding.”
The squabble spilled outside the bathroom because as Adams tells it “I was trying to get him out of the bathroom, away from my kids so they didn’t get hurt.”
His son was just as quick-thinking.
“He grabbed my daughter and locked themselves in a stall,” sheltering in place inside the men’s room as their dad duked it out with the belligerent attacker.
“We were outside the bathroom and I dodged one of his punches and punched him back and slammed him against the wall,” he said.
The hardhat’s hook drew blood.
“I am pretty sure I split his lip open.”
But the man kept coming at him and that’s when Adams managed to pin him down like a pretzel while the cops came.
Adams said the man “bailed before cops could get there” and he thinks the man kept shopping as if nothing happened; but “eventually they got him.”
Clinton police arrived minutes after a Walmart employee phoned 911.
According to Lt. Shawn Stoker, cops “were called to a fight in progress” and when they arrived they found the man who Adams said clocked him for letting his daughter using the little boy’s room.
“That’s the basis of this altercation,” Lt. Stoker said. “This man raised questions about his daughter being in the men’s restroom—that’s how this confrontation started.”
The whole incident is peculiar. Adams never met the local area shopping slugger, who cops are refusing for now to identify because more charges (in this case misdemeanor assault) are expected to be added to the disorderly conduct infraction.
“I don’t know what he was freaking out about,” Adams said. “The only thing that makes sense in my head at the the time was whole Obama thing with forcing transgenders to use bathrooms.”
Before Sunday’s fight, Adams never really put much thought about bathrooms becoming a battleground.
“I never gave much thought about Obama trying to push this and now I do,” he said. “It shouldn’t matter what you identify with but families should be allowed to go to the bathroom without trouble.”
Once the dangerous man was off shopping Adams said he immediately attended to his children who were still huddled in the stall.
“They were shaken up,” he said. “She was beside herself.”
But the scare didn’t stop his son from turning his champ of a dad into a big softy.
“My son looked at me and said ‘Can I play on your phone now?’’’
Adams admits he’s “been in plenty of fights” before but has never trained professionally and isn’t big on bragging about if he’s lost or won “because to say that is to look stupid.”
Still licking his wounds, Adams is just grateful his children were unharmed.
“My ribs hurt, my knee hurts but I’m going to live,” he said.
A Walmart rep refused to comment about the bathroom brawl at their store and referred us to Clinton PD.
Cops confirm the man who attacked Adams wasn’t under the influence and that they are working to look at potential surveillance footage at the Walmart store but they are certain the dad did nothing wrong.
“He clearly felt him and his family were being threatened,” Lt. Stoker said. “The other individual is determined to be the aggressor.”
Even after taking punches and kicks and landing a few of his own, the dad and his shell shocked family limped home with their blinds and bins. “We got what we came for in the end.”
