[3] At around 10:00 a.m., amid savage fighting, a lone patrolman bravely used his club to move through the gangsters in an attempt to take the ring leaders into custody.

He managed to crawl back to the sidewalk, and wearing only his cotton drawers, he ran towards the Metropolitan headquarters on White Street, where he informed the precinct of the fighting before he collapsed.

The gangsters responded by storming into the low houses lining The Bowery and Bayard Street, forcing residents out, and climbed to the rooftops, where they proceeded to shower the Metropolitan officers with stones and brickbats until they fled from the area.

Then the fugitives, being reinforced, would turn on their pursuers and compel a retreat to Mulberry, Elizabeth and Baxter streets.When the police left without their prisoners, the fighting stopped for a few moments.

The truce lasted only an hour or two as fighting resumed near The Tombs,[2] supposedly brought about by a group of women from the Five Points who had provoked the Dead Rabbits into attacking the Bowery gangs.

At one point, a Dead Rabbit stepped in front of his barricade and used his pistol to kill two Bowery Boys and wound two others despite heavy fire.

Although he tried to reason with them by telling them the futility of fighting, they refused to listen, and Rynders was forced to escape into the company of his henchmen, when the mob responded by throwing rocks at him.

[3] At around 9:00 p.m., the Eighth and the Seventy-First Regiments of the New York State Militia under Major-General Charles W. Sandford marched down White and Worth Streets with fixed bayonets.

The fighting ceased, with 500 men remaining at the City Arsenal until 4:00 a.m., although police and national guardsmen continued to patrol the district into the next day.

[2][3] American historian Tyler Anbinder claims that there is no evidence of a Dead Rabbits gang existing at all, and that the alleged organization was in fact a misnomer for the Roach Guards.

It was believed that many gang members were carried off by their friends and, over the next few days, those who were killed in the fighting were buried in cellars, hidden passageways, and other locations in the Five Points and Paradise Square.

[3] Many of the Five Points gangs, most notably the Dead Rabbits, resented the implications made by police and newspapers that they had been involved in criminal activity.

In the 2014 film, Winter's Tale, the Dead Rabbits and the Short Tails are featured prominently; a similar theme pervades Mark Helprin's 1983 novel of the same name.

Patricia Beatty's 1987 historical children's fiction novel Charlie Skedaddle mentions Dead Rabbits (the main character is a Bowery Boy).