There have been some interesting comments left on the original story at Windows to Russia ...

I'm a student at Pitt. I went over to the Protest to wait to see if I could get a glimpse of the World Leaders gathered at the Summit. Mainly people just stood around watching. The protesters were dancing in front of the SWAT teams. After a while the cops drove in and announced the protest unlawful and ordered us to disperse. Shortly after they fired tear gas/smoke/OC directly at us. That was when people began to run. I went back to the Union since it was my campus and quite a ways away from where all the delegates were. The SWAT teams lined up in front of the Cathedral and again ordered us to disperse. They shot my friend with a rubber bullet that injured his arm. They began to advance and we ran for my dorm and another SWAT team entered our quad from every direction cutting us off from the dorm. We ran into our lobby and watched as the cops fired tear gas directly out of our dorm. Seeing as our dorm is an all female dorm they came in and used force to get the guys who were trying to find some sort of shelter from the gas out. One of the SWAT men came in and asked to use the restroom and yelled at our security guard and us calling us idiots. They barricaded us in our dorms and asked if we felt safe. Which was a ridiculous question since we had seen a student beaten out in the quad. The whole riot was started by the police and the violence/window smashing (which I didn't even see) occurred when the police chased the protesters down the street. The police definitely overreacted. On a normal night at Pitt students would be out walking around not cowering in their dorms being scolded for not doing anything.

~~ Student

 ... and ...

Police pushed the crowd towards the cathedral in an effort to disperse the crowd. I thought the crowd gathered at the park because the Presidential motorcade was scheduled to drive by. It never did. We waited for nothing. If that was a protest it was lame. The amount of cops there was actually overkill, if not ridiculous. We were also delayed leaving the area because of a gay parade, which I might add, was not halted by any police. If it wasn't for the gay parade, we'd have been on the Parkway in less than 10 minutes.

~~ Serena