The multi-day event reached its boiling point when a Montbleu hotel security guard was viciously attacked.

The city of South Lake Tahoe is still reeling and recovering after a multi-day car show called Lake2o rolled into town and took over several of the city’s parking lots and popular tourists locations from Aug 12-16.

According to Douglas County police,

Out of the 208 calls between Aug 13-16 for service, 25 were related to the Lake2o motor vehicles. The calls for service ranged from speeding, parking, and one DUI arrest. The first call for service was at 1:21 p.m. on August 13, 2020 and the last call was 12:47 a.m. on August 16, 2020.

While not an official car show in the traditional sense of the term, Lake2O attendees were given an address to meetups throughout the week/weekend, resulting in hundreds of people gathered in one outdoor location.

With just an Instagram post reminding people to mask up and social distance, a glimpse at some photos and videos on social media show a large majority of attendees doing neither.

Here’s what one meetup looked like Saturday night, no masks and no social distancing.

Several commenters on Instagram and Facebook report incidents of revving, burnouts, and high-speed driving at meetup locations, which is bound to happen when you organize hundreds of pent-up car enthusiasts at one of the few car gatherings with the gall to go on with an event this year.

At one point, the meet organizer went on Instagram live, streaming live video from “the strip.” A handful of the meet organizers friends were “jokingly telling people do burnouts.” That live video’s already been deleted but not before an apology of sorts was posted shortly after.

At one particular meetup at McP’s Taphouse Grill parking garage, several burnouts left long lines of tire markings, defacing an otherwise clean parking structure.

In response, the meet organizer is supposedly heading up there later this week to rectify the situation and clean-up whatever mess their meetup left behind.

You can see some damage in his apology post.

The mayhem reached a boiling point Sunday night during another Lake2o meetup at Montbleu Resort, Casino, and Spa’s parking structure when, for some reason, one of their patrolling security guards was jumped and randomly attacked by a meet attendee.

Here are two videos from two different angles showing the attack including a “close-up” of the man in question.

In the aftermath of the week’s events the organizer has been on Instagram taking responsibility posting several apologies and condemning any illegal and negative actions taken.

Irresponsible hosting a car meet of this size during a pandemic.

It was bad enough that the meet organizer decided to “invade” a random California city over several days, but hosting this meet during a literal pandemic is unconscionable.

Hopefully local cases in El Dorado county do not spike, nor do Lake2o attendees report Covid-19 symptoms weeks later.

Blaming a few bad apples is not an excuse.

One popular justification for everything that went wrong during Lake2O was the result of “a few bad apples.”

Commenter @ronniemichelini_r56 posted,

Only If Tahoe residents would just understand that literally like 5% of the people were doing the wrong to their city…we didn’t come up there like f** ya let’s destroy these people’s city.

While that may be the case, a handful of people ruining the venue for the rest, pleading ignorance isn’t helping the meet’s case and it’s future moving forward.

Several locals showed up in the comments leaving their .02

@_myfriendofmisery_ commented,

I’ll be kind and straight to the point: don’t come back here anymore. Stay out of Tahoe. Don’t hold meet ups in our town anymore. These words are echoed though the majority of the local people, spoken across every social media outlet. We don’t want you here anymore.

“Hold it in Carson, hold it in Reno, Sac…anywhere else. But keep your cars, and your fan base, away from our city. I understand it was not you directly or your subordinates that caused this, and I appreciate your efforts to apologize and rectify the situation, but it was the audience that your show brought that did this damage. We do not want this audience here, ever again.

As this is literally the fourth year of this large car gathering, a foundation built on respect from day 1 should’ve been implemented and baked into the culture of the show. That means zero tolerance for negative behaviour.

The scale of this show was also to ambitious.

You can’t expect hundreds of car enthusiasts to govern themselves for the greater good.

I’m certain there will be a Lake2O in 2021. If this past week is any sign of how these meets go down, it sure as heck won’t be in South Lake Tahoe.

6 COMMENTS

  1. I could live without them returning. From fights and DUI’s to drifting in parking garage with resorts at capacity it’s unacceptable.

  2. Love how nothing good was mentioned, after all was said and done all trash and burn out marks were cleaned up. Everyone always looks at the negatives in everything. I guess South Lake Tahoe doesn’t want tourists cause that’s not how they keep their town afloat right? Last time I checked tourist are exactly what keeps all those small businesses running, tourist are what fill your hotels, motels, and casinos.

  3. Love how nothing good was mentioned, after all was said and done all trash and burn out marks were cleaned up. Everyone always looks at the negatives in everything. I guess South Lake Tahoe doesn’t want tourists cause that’s not how they keep their town afloat right? Last time I checked tourist are exactly what keeps all those small businesses running, tourist are what fill your hotels, motels, and casinos.

  4. I was there we go up every summer, but this year we had the unfortunate mistake of going at the same time. Thankful we had four days before these clowns showed up to enjoy the beautiful town of south lake. Did I read a “ few” burnouts a few “ bad apples”, please I have several videos showing it was basically all of them. Constant burnouts in that parking structure for hours. Drivers looking for pools of water to burnout in. Fencing torn down and this all right behind Lake Tahoe Blvd next to Harvey’s. I told my husband who is in law enforcement it’s going to get real ugly later in the evening. So much for a relaxing week those d*** drivers revving up their engines and one car I also have on video making constant back fire that sounded like gun shots going for minutes at a time. There were masks All over the ground everywhere people throwing their cans, cups and whatever just right on the ground. It’s this group of people and there are so many that have no respect!!! I don’t blame the citizens for not wanting tourists, but not all are like this. It did honestly make me not want to come back and we’ve came up for years.

    • Thanks for your comment.

      Feel free to reply whenever, to links to the videos (only if you don’t mind adding them to the article) and I’ll add them into the blog post above. You can also e-mail them to me at paulo.acoba@gmail.com.

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