In recent reporting from BuzzFeed, law enforcement enthusiast who was charged with the fatal shooting deaths of two in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during protests for Jacob Blake, was captured sitting in the front row of a Donald Trump rally in January.
Only seven months later Kyle Howard Rittenhouse showed up with an AR-15 in an unofficial capacity and shot two people on the third night of Black Lives Matter protests over the police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake.
He was captured hours later in Antioch, Illinois, and will face charges of first-degree intentional homicide.
The dead were identified only as 26-year-old Silver Lake, Wisconsin, resident and a 36-year-old from Kenosha. The wounded person, a 36-year-old from West Allis, Wisconsin, was expected to survive, police said.
“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.”
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 with his hands in the air as members of the crowd were yelling for him to be arrested because he had shot people.
As for why the gunman was allowed to leave, Sheriff David Beth portrayed a chaotic, high-stress scene, with screaming, chanting, nonstop radio traffic and “people running all over the place" — conditions that can cause “tunnel vision” among law officers.
Rittenhouse, identified in court papers as a lifeguard at a YMCA in Lindenhurst, Illinois, was assigned a public defender in Illinois for a hearing Friday on his transfer to Wisconsin. The public defender's office had no comment. Under Wisconsin law, anyone 17 or older is treated as an adult in the criminal justice system.