the kenosha vigilante shooter (a minor, it turns out, which somehow makes all of this even sadder and infuriating) was allowed to walk past the police, even after everyone was yelling that he had shot someone.
KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) — Two people were shot to death during another night of Black Lives Matter protests in Kenosha in a possible vigilante attack carried out by a young white man who was caught on cellphone video opening fire in the middle of the street with a semi-automatic rifle.“I just killed somebody,” he could be heard saying at one point Tuesday night.
Sheriff David Beth said that investigators had reviewed footage and that he was confident a suspect would be arrested soon.
The gunfire erupted just before midnight, during the third straight night of unrest in Kenosha over the police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake.
“We were all chanting ‘Black lives matter’ at the gas station and then we heard, boom, boom, and I told my friend, `‘That’s not fireworks,’” 19-year-old protester Devin Scott told the Chicago Tribune. “And then this guy with this huge gun runs by us in the middle of the street and people are yelling, ‘He shot someone! He shot someone!’ And everyone is trying to fight the guy, chasing him and then he started shooting again.”
Scott said he cradled a lifeless victim in his arms, and a woman started performing CPR, but “I don’t think he made it.”
One victim was shot in the head and the other in the chest, the sheriff told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. A third person suffered gunshot wounds not believed to be life-threatening.
According to witness accounts and video footage, police apparently let the young man responsible for the shootings walk past them with a rifle over his shoulder as members of the crowd were yelling for him to be arrested because he had shot people.
The sheriff told the Journal Sentinel that armed people had been patrolling the city’s streets in recent nights, but he did not know if the gunman was among them.
“They’re a militia,” Beth said. “They’re like a vigilante group.”
The FBI said it is assisting in the case.
Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who is Black, said in an interview with the news program “Democracy Now!” that the shootings were not surprising and that white militias have been ignored for too long.
“How many times across this country do you see armed gunmen, protesting, walking into state Capitols, and everybody just thinks it’s OK?” Barnes said. “People treat that like it’s some kind of normal activity that people are walking around with assault rifles.”
― The GOAT Harold Land (Karl Malone), Wednesday, 26 August 2020 18:05 (three years ago) link