Two men who took part in a fatal brawl outside Pat’s King of Steaks in 2021 pleaded guilty

Two men who participated in a fatal beating outside Pat’s King of Steaks in 2021 — a wild brawl among soccer fans who’d just attended a match in Chester — pleaded guilty Thursday to voluntary manslaughter and aggravated assault.

Omar Arce, 35, and Jose Flores-Huerta, 36, admitted that they threw punches and kicks during a fight that erupted at the iconic cheesesteak shop nearly three years ago. The melee left 28-year-old Isidro Cortes dead from head trauma, while a friend of his was hospitalized with facial wounds and Cortes’ father, then 64, suffered fractured ribs and a broken nose.

Neither Arce nor Flores-Huerta was viewed as a main aggressor in the fight, which was captured on surveillance video. Assistant District Attorney Ed Jaramillo said two other men who escalated the brawl by wielding trash can lids and beating victims who were struggling to stand up have never been caught and remain on the run.

Flores-Huerta also pleaded guilty Thursday to a second crime he committed while behind bars: serving as a lookout during a city jailbreak last spring, an incident in which two other people — one of whom was awaiting trial for four murders — escaped and went on the run for several days.

Common Pleas Court Judge J. Scott O’Keefe agreed to sentence Arce and Flores-Huerta to 11½ to 23 months in jail, plus five years’ probation, which will allow them to be released on immediate parole. But Arce, who had lived in the country for nearly two decades as an undocumented immigrant, will likely be deported to Mexico because of an outstanding immigration detainer related to this case, his attorney, James Funt, said in court.

The crime at Pat’s occurred about 2 a.m. on Sept. 16, 2021, several hours after a Concacaf Champions League semifinal in Chester between the Philadelphia Union and Club América, a team from Mexico City.

According to surveillance video from that night, groups of people who had attended the game were sitting at the shop’s sidewalk tables. Within seconds, people from one group — associated with Arce and Flores-Huerta — began assaulting the other, and the beatdown escalated almost immediately into a melee spanning the entire sidewalk and spilling into the street.

It remained unclear Thursday what prompted the brawl or why it grew so brutal so quickly. The people in each group did not know one another, attorneys said, and for almost an hour beforehand, they all interacted peacefully.

Then, suddenly, one of the men in the crowd punched Cortes, who was from Queens, N.Y. Police said the main perpetrators were two brothers: Osvaldo Pedraza, of Kensington, and Victor Pedraza, of South Philadelphia. Both went on to repeatedly kick and punch Cortes, his father, and his friend, even after all three were lying on the ground and clearly injured.

Arce and Flores-Huerta played peripheral roles in the chaos, video showed. Each testified briefly through an interpreter Thursday, expressing remorse for what happened and for Cortes’ death.

“I never knew this was going to happen,” Arce said.

O’Keefe, the judge, told Cortes’ relatives, who were in the courtroom, that he was “terribly sorry” for their loss, which he said was over something “incredibly stupid.”

The killing attracted attention in part because it was the second homicide to occur outside Pat’s in two months that spring.

In the other case, 22-year-old David Padro was shot to death outside the shop after he and a 36-year-old man from Reading, whom he didn’t know, got into a fight over a parking spot. The gunman in that case pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to 3½ to 10 years in prison, court records show.