Del. Gabriel Acevero (D-Montgomery) explains his vote on the House floor during a debate in 2025. (Photo by William J. Ford/Maryland Matters)
The head of a Montgomery County government employees union and a two-term delegate from the county traded blows during a scuffle Thursday evening outside an early voting center, and now they are trading accusations over the incident.
Gino Renne, the president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1994, the Montgomery County Government Employees Organization, has filed a second-degree assault complaint in Montgomery County District Court against Del. Gabriel Acevero (D-Montgomery) over the confrontation at Gaithersburg’s Bohrer Park.
Acevero, meanwhile, says he is the one who was assaulted by Renne “and I had to defend myself.”
It’s not the first beef between the two men — or the first time their versions of the same incident have differed. In 2020, Renne fired Acevero from his job as a field representative with the MCGEO.
According to a Maryland Matters report at the time, Acevero said Renne and representative of the Fraternal Order of Police tried to “strong-arm” him into dropping support for a bill that would have weakened police protections under the Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights, and he was fired after he refused to back down.
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In Renne’s telling of the story, the bill never came up at the meeting, which was called to discuss repeated shortcomings in Acevero’s performance. When Acevero started accusing police, and MCGEO, of corruption, pointing a finger in Renne’s face and making accusations despite repeated requests to “disengage” and focus on his performance, Renne said at the time, he “continues to be boisterous and disrespectful, so I said you’re fired. That’s it.”
Witnesses said the latest go-round began after 6 p.m. Thursday, the last day of in-person early voting for next week’s primary elections.
All that’s certain at this point is that both men were there and they got into a fight that knocked over some tables of campaigns present — and that, at some point, Rep. April McClain Delaney (D-6th), who happened to be at the voting center, intervened to break things up.
“I fight hard every day for my constituents but as a mom, I’m committed to keeping the peace, and I wasn’t going to just stand there and let a fight escalate at a polling place, the front lines of democracy,” McClain Delaney said in a statement released by her campaign.
Who threw the first punch is in dispute. Social media video of the altercation shows the fight breaking up. Gaithersburg Police were called, but by the time officers arrived “the individuals involved had already been separated, and the incident was not directly observed by the police,” according to the department, which said one “one individual sustained minor injury … and no arrests were made.”
Acevero said in a statement posted to Facebook at 9 p.m. Thursday that he was the victim.
In the statement, Acevero says he was sitting under a campaign tent and Renne was 10 feet away, near a ballot drop box, when Renne “began to verbally harass me before suddenly and menacingly advancing upon me in the tent, shouting expletives at me.”
“He invaded my personal space and continued to verbally harass me. After I spoke back to him, he took a swing at me,” Acevero’s statement said. “I had to use physical force to defend myself.”
Renne has a different version, telling Bethesda Today that Acevero “sucker-punched” him at the voting center.
He told the news outlet that the incident began when an MCGEO member said Acevero was handing out campaign literature beyond the “no electioneering” line at the voting center, and when the discussion got heated, he had to step in.
“I looked at him [Acevero] and I said, ‘This is the exact behavior that forced me to fire you,’” Renne told Bethesda Today.
The argument escalated, and when Acevero made comments about a past “personal matter” involving Renne’s wife, “That’s a line I don’t let anybody cross, when you start attacking my family.” He said he was within reach of Acevero, who then struck him in the face.
A union staffer came to Renne’s defense, he said, and all three “ended up going over a table” and fell to the ground. Renne said he scraped his knee and elbow in the struggle and has a swollen lip from the altercation.
“I never swung on him,” Renne said of Acevero. “He caught me totally off-guard with a sucker punch.”
Acevero’s statement said he “plans to press charges against Mr. Renne.” Renne has already done so, according to county district court records, filing a second-degree assault complaint against Acevero that night. A hearing has been set for July 28 in Montgomery County District Court in Rockville.
Originally published at Marylandmatters.Org