Earlier this month, a suburban Detroit man was viciously beaten by a mob on the east side of the city after accidentally hitting a boy crossing the street. The man is just now starting to recover from his injuries, but now there are allegations that his son spent funds collected for medical expenses at a strip club.
The story of Steven Utash has been a dividing one locally, since it involves a white man from the very white suburbs of very black Detroit getting beat up by a black group of troublemakers. Obviously if you're familiar with the racial history of Southeast Michigan, this needs no explanation. But if you're not, people in the past few weeks have called Detroit lawless and underscoring this incident as a reason why many white residents will never travel south of 8 Mile.
I think we can all agree that Utash's situation is unfortunate and those who beat him should be fully prosecuted. But until the case proceeds, Fox 2 has some questions about Utash's unemployed son, Joe Utash, and what he was doing with hundreds of dollars at a strip club, allegedly:
Joe is the son of Steven Utash, the driver who was beaten while stopping to help a boy he had just hit with his vehicle. A fundraiser was held Friday and Saturday night for his family at Winners in Clinton Township.
According to management at the Coliseum on Eight Mile, when Joe Utash arrived Saturday night he was intoxicated, announced who he was, said he had just come from a fundraiser and had money in his pocket.
Whether or not that story is true (as The Detroit News' Karl Henkel asked on Twitter yesterday, how do broadcast TV reporters have anonymous sources at strip clubs, of all places?) remains to be seen, as Utash denies that he spent donations for his father's expenses on lap dances.
What is true is that Joe Utash appears to be one of the world's biggest dumbasses:
He also says one of the dancers there stole hundreds of dollars from him. "I let her hold onto my money ... she wanted to see that I had the money to pay for the dance," Joe says. So, he says he gave her about $400 which was "his money" that he "worked for."
Yeah, I don't know much about strip clubs but I do know that you don't just let strangers anywhere just "hold" on to your money to see what it looks like. Especially not a stripper at a strip club whose job it is to, well, collect money for their services.
Utash's family told WXYZ that the money Joe Utash used was his own and that there are measures to make sure that any money raised is used for the right intent, but his sister did say it wasn't smart of him to walk into a strip club and announce how much money he had in light of recent events.