Focus of latest U.S. racial flashpoint shifts to accused Kenosha vigilante

[August 28, 2020]  By Brendan McDermid

KENOSHA, Wis. (Reuters) - An accused teenage vigilante facing charges he killed two people protesting in support of Jacob Blake Jr., the Black man shot in the back by a white policeman in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was due to appear in an Illinois courtroom on Friday.

Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, was charged on Thursday in Wisconsin with six criminal counts of first-degree intentional homicide, attempted homicide and reckless endangerment.

He was scheduled to make his first court appearance in Lake County, Illinois, where he was arrested on Wednesday, for a hearing on a request from Wisconsin authorities to have him extradited from Illinois.

Adding to the attention surrounding the case, Rittenhouse will be defended by a prominent law firm whose clients have included President Donald Trump's personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani and former Trump adviser Carter Page.

Lawyer John Pierce told Reuters on Thursday that he and colleagues at the firm, Pierce Bainbridge, had been retained to represent the teenager and were determined to obtain justice for him. L. Lin Wood, another member of the Rittenhouse's legal team, told CBS News his client had acted in self-defense.

"He was not there to create trouble, but he found himself with his life threatened, and he had the right to protect himself," Wood said.

Sunday's police shooting, in which Blake was gunned down and left paralyzed, turned Kenosha, a predominantly white city of about 100,000 residents on Lake Michigan, into the latest flashpoint in a summer of protests in the United States over police brutality and racism.

Rittenhouse, a resident of Antioch, Illinois whose arrest warrant listed his occupation as a lifeguard, is accused of shooting three protesters, two fatally, during demonstrations on Tuesday night in Kenosha.

Video footage from Tuesday's incident shows a young, white gunman firing an assault-style rifle at protesters who tried to subdue him, then walking calmly away from the scene, hands in the air - with his rifle slung around his neck - as several police vehicles drive by without stopping him.

According to the criminal complaint, another video shows Rittenhouse saying, "I just killed somebody," after shooting one of his alleged victims, 36-year-old Joseph Rosenbaum, who was gunned down in the parking lot of a used-car dealer.

Relative calm returned to Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Thursday after multiple nights of looting and two violent deaths, even as activists pushed for charges against the white policeman involved in the shooting of a Black man that sparked the unrest.

MARCH ON WASHINGTON

The renewed drive for racial justice across the country was ignited on May 25 when George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis, died in police custody under the knee of a white officer.

Protesters planned a march on Washington on Friday, commemorating the anniversary of the 1963 rally where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

The civil strife of recent months has drawn comparisons to the outpouring of anger and civil unrest that flared after King's assassination in 1968.

In Kenosha, three nights of skirmishes between protesters and police in riot gear following Blake's shooting gave way on Wednesday and Thursday to peaceful, smaller demonstrations.

The police officers involved in the Kenosha incident, including Rusten Sheskey, a seven-year veteran of the police force identified by authorities as having fired all seven shots at Blake from directly behind him, have been placed on leave.

Blake's family and protesters have demanded the officers be fired and prosecuted. The investigation has been turned over to the Wisconsin Justice Department, while the U.S. Justice Department has opened a civil rights inquiry.

The exact sequence of events leading to Blake's shooting remain sketchy.

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul said on Wednesday the confrontation stemmed from a domestic complaint lodged by a girlfriend, and that investigators had recovered a knife from the front floorboard of the car that Blake was leaning into when he was shot from behind at point-blank range.

Blake's lead attorney, civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, said his client had no knife in his possession and did nothing to provoke or threaten police before he was shot.

(Reporting by Brendan McDermid in Kenosha; Additional reporting by Nathan Layne, Rich McKay, Daniel Trotta and Barbara Goldberg; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Frances Kerry)

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