By Daryl Lang
For The Patriot-News

STATE COLLEGE -- At least 19 people were arrested early yesterday when about 4,000 students stormed the streets after the Penn State basketball team lost to Temple in the NCAA tournament.

As the game was ending shortly before midnight Friday, thousands of people massed in an area of student apartment buildings near the University Park campus, cheering "We are Penn State!" Some threw beer bottles, lit firecrackers and toppled street signs.

Police used pepper spray repeatedly to clear people from the sidewalks.

State College Police Chief Tom King said the crowd numbered 4,000. He said he knew of seven people who were injured, including five police officers.

"This was a hostile crowd. This was a drunk crowd," King said yesterday.

It took officers until about 3:30 a.m. to restore calm.

As the mob swelled, police officers put on helmets and confronted people along three blocks of East Beaver Avenue.

"We knew it was going to happen whether we won or lost," said one man, who like many in the thick of the melee, declined to give his name.

"We lost," added his friend, who was grimacing from pepper spray in his eyes. "If we won, it would have been 10 times worse."

The uproar was in the same spot as the riots in the summers of 1998 and 2000 during the annual Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts. Each of those resulted in more than a dozen arrests.

A similar gathering occurred there last week after Penn State beat North Carolina in the tournament, but police said the mood was jovial and no damage or arrests were reported.

King said 80 to 100 police officers from six departments were on the scene yesterday.

One of the officers suffered a broken nose when a suspect punched him at the police station, King said. Other officers were hit with flying bottles.

A woman was struck in the face during the melee and required stitches at a nearby hospital, King said. He also said three men attacked an apartment security guard and sprayed him in the eyes with his own pepper spray.

At one point, six people surrounded a police car, rocked it and tried to set it afire by unscrewing the gas cap and trying to drop a match or cigarette lighter into the tank, police Lt. Diane Conrad said.

"I think this school -- they're just looking for action wherever they go," said Penn State senior Jason Ramesar, who said he was headed home after the game but stopped to watch the uprising. "They were going to riot whether we won or lost."

Gabriel Bryant, a Penn State senior and president of the Council for Commonwealth Student Governments, was among those hit in the face with chemical spray.

Rubbing his eyes, Bryant complained that the police should not have sprayed him.

As he said it, a man wearing only underwear ran past police into the street. Two officers aimed their chemical canisters at him, and the man bent over in pain.

"Did you see that?" Bryant asked. "They just sprayed him for no reason."

In the ground floor of a nearby parking garage, police set up a makeshift first-aid station to clean chemical spray off the faces of people they had detained, some of whom were wearing plastic handcuffs.

A block away, a large group of men shouted profanities at officers from an alley. Police split up the group with spray and arrested several of them.

In the alley behind St. Paul's United Methodist Church, two student faith groups set up a table and gave away bagels.

Campus minister Bob Johns, director of the Wesley Student Center, said the students occasionally offer free food on weekends as an act of good will and had planned to do it Friday night even before Penn State's basketball team advanced to the NCAA regionals.

The groups later complied with a police request to stop their handouts.

University administrators quickly condemned the melee.

"We have a drinking problem in State College," said Bill Mahon, Penn State's director of public information, who walked onto Beaver Avenue before the basketball game. He said he wanted to be there in case trouble broke out.

Mahon said the arrested students might be suspended or expelled, as students have been after the past riots.

In a written statement, Penn State President Graham Spanier commended the police and pledged to cooperate with State College authorities to prevent such disturbances.

Yesterday afternoon, 19 people had been charged, including 16 Penn State students. All but one were men.

King said a 20th person would be charged pending an investigation and more arrests could follow after police review pictures and videos.

Police were alerted earlier in the week to the possibility of a riot Friday, having overheard conversations, King said.

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