Teenage gunman who shot dead two men at Wisconsin protest is cleared of murder

Published

2 years ago

November 16, 2021

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A teenager has been found not guilty of the murders of two men and the attempted murder of a third at a demonstration in Wisconsin.

Kyle Rittenhouse, 18, had pleaded self-defence over the shootings in the city of Kenosha in August 2020.

The deadly incident happened during protests sparked by the shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake, who was injured by a white police officer days earlier.

Rittenhouse was cleared of all charges, including recklessly endangering safety. As the verdicts were read out, he broke down in tears, while jurors remained stoic and emotionless.

Live reaction as Rittenhouse acquitted

Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder dismissed the jurors and assured them the court would take “every measure” to keep them safe.

A sheriff’s deputy took Rittenhouse out via a back door through the judge’s chambers.

Relatives of the three men who were shot held hands and cried.

Outside the courthouse, there was a heavy police presence, as several dozen protesters carried placards supporting or condemning the teenager.

Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time of the shootings, had travelled from the neighbouring state of Illinois.

He claimed in court that he had been asked to help protect the community by a local business owner.

The jury of 12 had been selected from a wider group of 18 who had listened to the evidence over two weeks.

In an unusual move, marking the beginning of a trial full of suspense and drama, Rittenhouse himself was asked to select the jurors by pulling six pieces of paper with their names on them from a lottery tumbler – a task usually carried out by a court clerk.

The six jurors he selected were designated as alternative jurors while the remaining 12 became the deliberating jurors.

The jury had been asked to consider two widely conflicting narratives which led to the shooting of the three men.

The prosecution had argued that Rittenhouse was a “wannabe soldier” and a vigilante who had travelled to Kenosha bent on stirring trouble at the protest.

Prosecutor Thomas Binger had argued that the teenager had caused a deadly chain of events by bringing a legally owned automatic AR15 rifle to a protest, walking about like “a hero in a western” and that he was “looking for trouble”.

After the verdict, Mr Binger said that the jury had spoken.

During the protest, Rittenhouse first shot Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, who was unarmed.

He then shot Anthony Huber, 26, who had struck the defendant with a skateboard. He was also killed.

The third man to be shot, Gaige Grosskreutz, 28, was carrying a pistol.

He was injured and gave evidence for the prosecution.

The court saw footage from a drone which the prosecution argued showed the defendant pointing his weapon at people.

“This is provocation,” the prosecuting attorney had argued. “This is what starts this incident.”

Rittenhouse’s defence attorney, Mark Richards, argued that his client was acting in self-defence after coming under attack at the protest.

Mr Richards said Rittenhouse had travelled to the city to act as a medic and to protect property.

The defence had cast the first of Rittenhouse’s targets as a “crazy person”.

Mr Richards argued that Joseph Rosenbaum ambushed the defendant who had feared that his rifle would be taken from him and used against him.

At times during proceedings, Rittenhouse broke down in tears as he gave his own evidence.

Mr Huber’s parents Karen Bloom and John Huber said after the verdicts that they were “heartbroken and angry”.

“Today’s verdict means there is no accountability for the person who murdered our son.

“It sends the unacceptable message that armed civilians can show up in any town, incite violence, and then use the danger they have created to justify shooting people in the street.

“We hope that decent people will join us in forcefully rejecting that message and demanding more of our laws, our officials, and our justice system.”

Rittenhouse’s mother Wendy had gasped in delight when the verdicts were read, later crying and embracing those around her.

David Hancock, spokesman for the Rittenhouse family, said: “We are all so very happy that Kyle can live his life as a free and innocent man, but in this whole situation there are no winners – there are two people who lost their lives and that’s
not lost on us at all.”

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People president and chief executive Derrick Johnson wrote on Twitter that the verdict “is a reminder of the treacherous role that white supremacy and privilege play within our justice system”.

Also on Twitter, the National Rifle Association wrote: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Black Voters Matter wrote: “Disappointed but not surprised. This is not justice, this is not accountability. However, this is America.”

US President Joe Biden said: “While the verdict in Kenosha will leave many Americans feeling angry and concerned, myself included, we must acknowledge that the jury has spoken.

“I ran on a promise to bring Americans together, because I believe that what unites us is far greater than what divides us.

“I know that we’re not going to heal our country’s wounds overnight, but I remain steadfast in my commitment to do everything in my power to ensure that every American is treated equally, with fairness and dignity, under the law.”

He added: “I urge everyone to express their views peacefully, consistent with the rule of law.

“Violence and destruction of property have no place in our democracy.

“The White House and federal authorities have been in contact with Governor Evers’s office to prepare for any outcome in this case, and I have spoken with the governor this afternoon and offered support and any assistance needed to ensure public safety.”

Wisconsin’s governor Tony Evers said: “No verdict will be able to bring back the lives of Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, or heal Gaige Grosskreutz’s injuries, just as no verdict can heal the wounds or trauma experienced by Jacob Blake and his family.

“No ruling today changes our reality in Wisconsin that we have work to do towards equity, accountability and justice that communities across our state are demanding and deserve.”

He asked any protesters to have their voices heard “safely and peacefully”.

About 500 members of the Wisconsin National Guard have been placed on standby in an undisclosed location 60 miles from the city to move in at the order of the governor.

The units will not be deployed unless the local police in the city requests their assistance. Their role will be limited to protecting locations deemed critical infrastructure and cultural institutions.

Residents of the city are nervous having experienced the significant unrest last summer in the wake of the shooting by police of 29-year-old Jacob Blake.

The shooting – one of a number last year by police against the black community – promoted widespread protests in Kenosha.

In his closing instructions to the jurors, the judge, Bruce Schroeder explained that in order to accept Rittenhouse’s claim of self-defence, they must accept that he believed there was an unlawful threat to him and that the force he used was “reasonable and necessary”.

US

Lithium mine being built on ‘sacred ground’ where Native Americans say they were massacred

Published

12 hours ago

May 6, 2024

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Lithium mine being built on 'sacred ground' where Native Americans say they were massacred

It could be a scene from centuries ago. In the Nevada desert, Native Americans are protesting over a mining project they say desecrates sacred land.

They are riding to Sentinel Mountain, which their ancestors once used as a lookout in times gone by. Here, they say, more than 30 of their people were massacred by US cavalry in 1865.

Today, the land is at the heart of America’s electric car revolution and Joe Biden’s clean energy policy

Native American tribal members say the mine neglects their interests and offends their history.

The route of the “Prayer Horse Ride”, a journey on horseback through mining-affected communities in Northern Nevada, is designed to publicise their objections.

“Being the original inhabitants of the land means we have cultural ties and roots to these landscapes,” says Gary McKinney, a member of the Duck Valley Shoshone Paiute tribe.

“To me, it’s sacred ground,” says Myron Smart. His grandmother survived the massacre of 1865 as a baby. Industrialising this place, he says, offends her memory and reflects the story of Native Americans through time.

“We’re people too. We have red blood just like everybody in the United States.”

However, a US judge has rejected their complaints and the project is going ahead.

The open mine, which is on public land, will source lithium to power up to a million electric vehicles a year and will create 1,800 jobs in its construction phase.

President Biden aims to make the United States a world leader in electric vehicle technology and reduce reliance for lithium supply on countries like China.

The Thacker Pass project has supporters as well as opponents.

Lithium Americas, the company behind the project, insists the mine is not located on a massacre site. This was supported by a judge in 2021 who ruled the evidence presented by tribes “does not definitely establish that a massacre occurred” within the proposed project area.

Tim Crowley, the company’s VP of Government and External Affairs, said in a statement to Sky News: “Lithium Americas is committed to doing this project right, which is why we have a community benefits agreement in place with the local Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe that ensures benefits from Thacker Pass accrue to them.

“Concerns about cultural and environmental resources were thoroughly addressed in the BLM’s (Bureau of Land Management) approved Environmental Impact Statement, which withstood comprehensive reviews by the Federal District and Circuit Courts.”

However, members of different Nevada-based Native American tribes continue to oppose the mining project. They say their evidence of the 1865 massacre, and a separate inter-tribal conflict, is rooted in the oral history passed on from their ancestors, through generations – not collated with a court case in mind, but compelling nonetheless.

“Back in our ancestors’ days, they didn’t write any documentation down, they didn’t send letters, they didn’t write in journals,” says Gary. “So there was no way that the United States government could know our story.

“These stories have been passed down generation to generation, so we have direct lineage from survivors of these massacres, which is how these stories remain in our families.”

The courts have also rejected complaints by tribal members and conservationists on the environmental impact and planning consultation.

The project throws a focus onto the issues surrounding the pursuit of clean energy.

“First off, we have to acknowledge that we need electric vehicles,” says Amanda Hurowitz of Mighty Earth, a global environmental non-governmental organisation.

They are more efficient than petrol and diesel cars, she says, and they are needed for the US to hit its climate targets.

But they also need more mined minerals – like lithium – and getting those materials out of the ground has an impact.

“All mining operations need to get consent from the local people,” she adds, “and the more consent, the better.”

US

California mocked over ‘billion-dollar’ bridge to nowhere

Published

1 day ago

May 5, 2024

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California mocked over 'billion-dollar' bridge to nowhere

Authorities in California have been mocked over a “billion-dollar” bridge to nowhere.

The state government of California has long planned for a Los Angeles to San Francisco high-speed rail project.

Despite initial funding being approved back in 2008, the line is still a long way off and expected to cost over $100bn in total.

So far, construction has only begun on the earliest phase and further funding has been used on environmental planning ahead in the Phase I System.

However, the California High-Speed Rail Authority recently publicised one of the completed sections of construction – finished back in 2018 and reported to cost $1bn on its own.

This is a 0.3-mile stretch of bridge, called The Fresno River Viaduct in Madera County, and it has attracted ridicule for going from nowhere to nowhere.

Pictures shared by the authority of the bridge show it connected to nothing at either end with some claiming it is indicative of the wider project.

It runs above a road and close to a number of houses – parallel to another rail track – but currently serves no purpose.

Elon Musk poked fun at the recent X post of the construction, with the billionaire posting a crying emoji in response to news of the project.

Others waded in as well on social media.

However, a number of those criticising it made false claims of the viaduct, its cost and time it took to complete it.

Since it was finished six years ago, after three years of construction, dozens more structures have been completed and there are over a hundred miles in active construction across the project.

Due to the vast scale of high-speed rails, they are often complex, expensive and lengthy projects – with the California High Speed Rail being no different.

The rail would come into use some time in the early 2030s but scrapping it reportedly remains a possibility.

California High Speed Rail has been approached for comment.

US

In Washington DC and Gaza two very different families are united by one very rare disease

Published

1 day ago

May 5, 2024

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In Washington DC and Gaza two very different families are united by one very rare disease

It is a paradox that humanity at its very worst so often also brings out its very best too.

This is a story about the kindness of strangers. It’s a story about hope over hopelessness. It’s about the war in Gaza but also about the rarest of diseases.

It is about two families in worlds far apart. It is a story about two little girls, Julia and Annabel.

I don’t yet know how it will end. But this is how it started.

It was two weeks ago when my phone pinged: a message on Instagram from a friend-of-a-friend. Her name is Nina Frost.

Nina and I first met a few years ago at a party in Washington DC where she had told me about her daughter Annabel, a little girl with an ultra-rare genetic disorder called AHC.

I remember Nina explaining how it was a disease like no other.

‘The human time bomb disease’ she had called it, based on the all-consuming parental nightmare that their little girl could have a fatal seizure at any moment.

I’ve followed Nina’s Instagram, @HopeForAnnabel since we first met.

The good news is that Annabel is doing well, albeit with that eternal danger hanging over her. She requires constant care, attention and love.

Nina’s message to me wasn’t about her own daughter. It was about another little girl, in Gaza.

Rare diseases like AHC, which stands for Alternating Hemiplegia of Childhood, generate tight networks; the families living with the condition. Only about 1,000 people worldwide have been diagnosed with AHC. It really is rare.

“There is a little girl stuck in Gaza with the disease,” Nina wrote to me.

“Julia is three – after the last few months she has become paralyzed and unable to eat as her symptoms have worsened dramatically. We are desperate to help as she is massively vulnerable – literally on the brink of death.”

Nina told me how she and her husband, Simon, are trying to organise the impossible: to get specialist drugs into Gaza and, ultimately, to try to get Julia and her family out.

Nina was modest about an endeavour that I now know has been all-consuming and expensive.

To tell this remarkable story of kindness and hope, I asked Nina to share with me Julia’s father’s number. Our local colleagues in Gaza then tracked the family down to a tent in the southern city of Rafah.

Julia Abu Zaiter is from northern Gaza originally. But with her father Amjad, her mother Maha and her older sister Sham, she was forced south by the Israeli military.

“My girl is three and a half years old. I want her to go out and play with the other children. Now, she cannot move at all,” Julia’s mother told our team, cradling her severely disabled little girl.

Rafah is on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. Safety is so close and yet beyond reach unless the right strings are pulled with different authorities and governments in a labyrinth of wartime bureaucracy.

The images filmed by our team confirm what Nina had feared in her message to me.

Julia and her family are in the toughest of conditions. The house next to the tent was bombed a few days before our team visited.

The Abu Zaiters are now stuck in the city that could be the next battlefield and with a daughter whose condition is compounded by just the slightest stress, a little girl with, as Nina had told me, the ‘time bomb disease’.

“I told myself ‘it’s over, my girl is gone’,” Julia’s mother told our Gaza team, showing them Julia’s semi-paralysed state.

“Then a man named Simon contacted us and told us he will see if he can help, because his daughter’s situation is similar to mine.”

Five thousand miles away, and a world apart, in a leafy northwest suburb of Washington DC, I am now sitting with Simon, Nina and Annabel.

It is humbling to listen to their words – about their own daughter, but about their fight for a stranger too.

“Annabel lives with the most challenging condition that we can imagine – a neurological degeneration – and she lives with it with a smile on her face,” Simon says. “And we’re imagining the same for Julia in the most dire of circumstances.”

We look at videos of Julia which Amjad has sent to Simon.

“Our kids are all so similar… we feel a sense of connection to so many families and our world of rare disease,” Nina tells me.

“This is like that but on steroids. I mean, we feel so distressed for the situation that they’re facing.”

“Julia’s circumstances are exponentially worse, but I think we’ve always embraced the idea that we can do something to help, we must do something to help and that we should. I mean, I think it’s always been if not us, then who?” Nina adds.

Amjad’s message highlights concerns he has about his daughter. He is looking for reassurance from Simon.

Julia is experiencing some severe paralysis and via a translated SMS and a few photos, Amjad wants some encouragement which Simon can’t give.

“They don’t have the medicines they need and the doctors that they need to really treat and properly prevent episodes and to address them when she has them,” Simon says.

“So we’ve been trying to gather a group that can support her. It’s been constant communication and really difficult with the translation issues,” Simon tells me.

Over in Gaza, Julia’s mum is desperate. “Our conditions due to the war are below zero.

“Our situation is horrible. I cannot provide my daughter with any food or drinks. I can get medications through lots of difficulty, and I tell myself that getting these medications is more important than getting food for us.”

Against the odds, Simon has managed to coordinate with the right people to get the right medication into Gaza for Julia.

Through the tight AHC network, one doctor has prompted another who knows another and another. That’s how this works. Threads of kindness stitched together.

Now the challenge is getting Julia out to Egypt and then on a medical flight to Abu Dhabi. It will be hard, maybe impossible.

“And it seems like she’s really declined,” Nina says looking at the latest videos of Julia.

“I mean, it seems like exactly what we would have predicted has happened. She has gone from being a happy three-year-old with a profoundly difficult disease to being this shell of herself.”

“I feel like I am losing her,” Maha says with Julia in her arms. “She is dying right next to me and I cannot even do anything. The thing I fear the most is losing my daughter.”

There is some chance of an extraction to safety soon. It is not guaranteed but it is some hope for one little girl in a place where uncertainty is all around.

This is a story about two families worlds apart but bound by a disease.

I don’t yet know how it will end. This may feel sometimes like a world of hopelessness, but I have some hope.