Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Anna Stebbins pulled up to the Walmart in Palmdale on Thursday night and came upon a pre-Black Friday scene she had heard about before, but had never experienced at the megastore:

Hordes of shoppers were shouting in each other’s faces in the parking lot, and a crowd of more than 100 people gathered around them with their phones fixed on the confrontation.

Stebbins and about seven other deputies — the Palmdale station’s entire Thanksgiving evening shift, by her estimate — stepped out of their patrol cars and tried to break up the fracas.

“It was a really crazy scene,” she said.