75-year-old Pokemon Go fan faces 3 days in jail after fist-fighting another player over a local gym

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Pokemon Go directly to jail

Pokemon anime
(Image credit: The Pokemon Company)

A pair of Pokemon Go players – a 75-year-old man and his adult son – have been convicted for dunking another player in a lake and punching them repeatedly in a fight apparently started over ownership of a local gym. 

In 2018, Robert Matteuzzi and his son Angelo were on a Pokemon Go team trying to conquer a gym in Kirkwood Park, located in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. According to the victim, who goes by the in-game name 'Sammy the Bull,' an argument over the gym led to Angelo throwing punches. The ensuing brawl saw both the victim and the younger Matteuzzi fall into the five-foot-deep water of a nearby lake.

With the defense arguing that the Matteuzzis did not initiate the fight, Robert said that he "didn’t want to be in the water." After being reminded that he did, in fact, enter the water to join the fight, he said "when you’re 71 and you get punched in the head, you don’t know what you’re doing."

Please don't get into any fights over the Pokemon Go Halloween event this year.

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.