I was at an all day music concert/festival at a large well known outdoor venue when a gigantic fight broke out. There had to have been at least 50 different people fighting in an area around the size of a football field. Trouble is no cops showed up or got involved fast enough. Girl got hit by a guy and I snapped, went into the thick of it, im not proud of it now but i got pretty violent and i put the the guy down hard after a few seconds of fighting, and then before i knew it i went down and was getting choked out with a guy saying literally in my ear "im going to f*cking choke you to death for hitting my brother". he meant it, and it wasnt the headlocks or chokes i was used to growing up, it was an i want to kill you choke. real terror was the moment I believed him after i couldnt get out of it with my best effort and felt everything go dark. later learned a friend had to kick the guy pretty bad (yeah in the head) to get him off of me. I dont remember it. my only memory right after was this ridiculous charge of like 30 of their friends or inbred cousins to the area of the fight and i was so gassed and physically depleted my best option seemed like swimming across a 20-30 yard canal that i was 100% sure i wouldnt make it across. i didnt have the air to say my own name at the time and there was so much chaos going on i dont think anyone wouldve been there to help if i got in the water. dont remember what happened, i think i hid behind a car but im glad i didnt get in the water. there were a bunch of lawsuits filed against the police, apparently people had video of them not intervening, ive always told myself to this day that they didn't have enough cops around to handle the situation and because of that, didn't get involved.
tl;dr ... was getting choked out and thought no one was around to help, then almost made a dumb choice of trying to swim a distance i couldnt make