Most incidents on cruise ships get stopped before they even happen. Cruise lines monitor passengers' alcohol consumption and engage with them in order to slow them down or even cut them off before a problem comes up.
And, while fights on cruise ships tend to go viral on social media, they are actually very rare. In most cases, security steps in before anything really happens, and there's no video to go viral.
Cruise ships have security all over the ship, which is similar to what a casino has on land. There are cameras in all public areas, which allows the security team to get involved before an issue escalates.
What a cruise line can't plan for, however, is a rogue passenger who misbehaves out of nowhere. That's what happened on a recent sailing of Royal Caribbean's Navigator of the Seas sailing out of Los Angeles.
It was a terrifying incident that one passenger caught on camera. And, while it was scary for the passenger caught near the action, how the event was handled also shows how incredibly prepared Royal Caribbean security teams are to handle any and every problem.
Passenger attacks Royal Caribbean crew member
Transcript:
Welcome back to Fox 11. I'm Gretchen Bolander. Only on Fox 11, a wild confrontation caught on camera on a cruise ship.
It happened on a ship that left San Pedro bound for Ensenada. Haley Winslow has a story you can see only on Fox 11. The gentleman that was drunk, uh, said that he was going to kill us.
And then he started chasing us down the hallway. Chaos on a cruise caught on camera. My first time ever going on a real vacation kind of thing like, you know, going into international waters and going to Mexico and stuff.
Christopher McHale set sail to Ensenada to celebrate he and his wife's birthdays and their anniversary Friday with a dozen family and friends for a long weekend aboard Royal Caribbean's Navigator of the Seas.
Not even an hour outside of the port of San Pedro and Christopher McHale went back to his room to put his phone on the charger, grab a jacket and watch an action movie on the top deck. When all of a sudden the action came to him.
"Yeah, I was waiting for them to say cut and come out of the rooms, but there was it was real life events."
McHale captures these videos showing a man in a possible drunken fit of rage, spewing profanity and racial slurs. The crew member that I was running with was able to lock himself in one of the towel rooms.
"I was kind of scared because I was like, dude, like I'm stuck in this hallway. Everybody else is kind of like behind something."
McHale says the now shirtless man tries to kick down the door with his steel toed boots after kicking a crew member in the face and punching another gonna flick me and just throwing me like 30 feet because the guy he punched kind of flew a couple of feet back.
Armed with pepper spray towels, zip ties and handcuffs. This security team is finally able to move in kind of acted like they were just waiting for with like SWAT team and set up like a barrier.
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And then they attacked. So they just waited for him to kind of run out of energy.
McHale spent the rest of his vacation talking with Royal Caribbean management and the FBI about this incident. Everybody kind of like dogpiled him.
The ship does have, um, jails down there. And he was what to do. And he was like in there this entire time and, um.
"Yeah, it's kind of sucks that it happened the first couple hours of the vacation. So it's like you kind of Mexico was no bueno. Yeah, he kind of ruined it for his family in San Pedro.
Haley Winslow, Fox 11 news.
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