POMPANO BEACH — Months after a disagreement over movie seats led to a violent assault in a Pompano Beach theater that left a 63-year-old man hospitalized, detectives have arrested a suspect.
Jesse Montez Thorton II, 27, was arrested Thursday in Fort Lauderdale on charges of aggravated assault with great bodily harm.
“I hope that he’s enjoying jail, and contemplating his upcoming future,” the victim, Marc Cohen, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in a text Friday. “I can’t wait to face him.”
Over the two months leading up to Thorton’s arrest, the case garnered national and international attention, the Broward Sheriff’s Office said in a release, in part due to video footage that captured the assault.
The assault occurred on a Monday night in mid-July. Cohen had arrived at the AMC movie theater on Federal Highway with his wife to watch the movie “Insidious,” according to the Broward Sheriff’s Office, but the couple never got past the previews.
Cohen had bought VIP tickets that included assigned seating, the release said. When he and his wife entered the theater, he saw Thorton and an unidentified woman in their seats.
When he “politely” asked Thorton to move, Thorton became “hostile,” the release said. He stood up, so close to Cohen that Cohen had to step back onto the stairs in the aisle.
Footage of the incident, which spread across the internet, shows Cohen falling down on the stairs while a man stands over him, punching him in the face repeatedly until witnesses pulled the man off.
Cohen was hospitalized while the suspect and the woman walked out of the theater.
The case and the video “received national and international media attention and generated leads,” the release said, including an anonymous Broward Crime Stoppers tip. After working the case for months, detectives finally identified Thorton as the man in the video, and Fort Lauderdale Police and detectives with the Broward Sheriff’s Office Violent Crimes Unit took him into custody.
He is currently being held in Broward Main Jail in lieu of $250,000 bond.