In case you hadn't heard, things got ugly during last night's Rage Against the Machine set at Lollapalooza, both in the mosh pit and the streets outside the festival, where between 500 and 2000 freeloaders formed a flying wedge and crashed a police barricade about 2/3rds into the set. As one Chicago Police Officer said to me, "they all got in."

Jim DeRogatis and the rest of the Sun-Times' crew at the festival took great pains to piece together just what happened last night. Read it here.

The highlights:

"The opening for this mass surge came when the gate opened to allow the CTA bus that had been parked in that area to leave....

According to security personnel who were on the scene, the incident happened some time after the CTA bus pulled out. What prompted it was a C3 staffer ordering security to open the access gate to ease a bottleneck in the crowd already in the park. Concertgoers were jammed on a stairway leading down to Hutchinson Field, and some wanted to leave the crowd.

Security initially resisted opening the gate, believing "It was a bad call, bad judgment" by the C3 employee to open an access point that was not supposed to be unlocked until after Rage's performance ended. But when the C3 staffer insisted, security complied, and as people began to leave Grant Park, the crowd across the street seized the moment: "They bum-rushed the gate like they were in Korea protesting the Olympics."

The flying wedge of gate crashers entered the park and broke into two contingents, one simply rushing down the stairs and into the field and another hopping a high fence to gain access to the field through the V.I.P. areas and luxury cabanas."

Be sure to check the full story out:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/derogatis/2008/08/raging_during_the_rage_set_h...

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