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You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Excellent (Heartbreaking) Read: “A mentally ill man, a heavily armed teenager and the night Kenosha burned”

Excellent (Heartbreaking) Read: “A mentally ill man, a heavily armed teenager and the night Kenosha burned”

by Anne Laurie|  October 4, 20203:53 pm| 8 Comments

This post is in: Civil Rights, Excellent Links, Gun Issues, Shitty Cops

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A mentally ill man, a heavily armed teenager and the night Kenosha burned https://t.co/RDjU224dhG

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 4, 2020

Anti-police-brutality demonstrators were converging on Kenosha from all over Wisconsin for a second night of marches. An armed right-wing group had put out a call for “patriots willing to take up arms and defend [our] City tonight from the evil thugs.”

Joseph Rosenbaum — depressed, homeless and alone — didn’t belong to either side. He had spent most of his adult life in prison for sexual conduct with children when he was 18 and struggled with bipolar disorder. That day, Aug. 25, Rosenbaum was discharged from a Milwaukee hospital following his second suicide attempt in as many months and dumped on the streets of Kenosha.

His confrontation hours later with Kyle Rittenhouse, a heavily armed teenager who had answered the call for “patriots,” kicked off a chain of violence — the deadliest of the summer — that left Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, dead. A third victim, Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, lost a chunk of his right biceps but survived.

Within hours, the three men and the teenager who shot them were assigned roles in the country’s churning partisan drama. On the right, Rosenbaum, Huber and Grosskreutz were cast as antifa foot soldiers, bankrolled by shadowy forces and determined to set fires and spread anarchy. On the left, the three shooting victims, all of them White, were celebrated as anti-racist martyrs battling armed vigilantes who had coalesced to support police departments accused of racism and brutality…

The real story of the Kenosha shootings offers a different view of the sometimes-chaotic protests and counterprotests that have shaken American cities this summer. The confrontation between Rittenhouse and Rosenbaum, and the bloodshed that followed, was more accidental than political — the product of anger, alienation and a tragic, chance encounter between a mentally ill man and a heavily armed teenager.

This story is based on court documents, videos from the demonstrations and interviews with more than three dozen of the victims’ friends and relatives. Some of them, such as Rosenbaum’s fiancee and Huber’s girlfriend, spoke at length for the first time, providing the most comprehensive account to date of Rosenbaum’s and Huber’s often painful childhoods, past encounters with police and paths to the protests that night.

Each of the three shooting victims was drawn for different reasons to the demonstrations that erupted after the Aug. 23 wounding of a Black man, Jacob Blake, by a White police officer. Their lives, forever linked by the bullets from Rittenhouse’s assault-style rifle, had proceeded along different routes, and each carried objects that shed light on their journeys and motivations…

The story doesn’t discuss Kyle Rittenhouse beyond the barest description of the shooting, but he doesn’t seem to have had the most salutatory background, either:

To be clear about this. At event sponsored by the Waukesha GOP in Wisconsin, the mother of the 17-year-old boy who took a rifle across state lines to Kenosha, and shot three people, killing two… Received a standing ovation. Led by one of the right’s most notorious racists.

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) September 25, 2020

Lawyers for Kyle Rittenhouse have raised nearly $2 million for his defense by depicting the alleged Kenosha shooter as an American hero. Some legal experts say that rhetoric may draw donors, but it could hurt the teen's chances before a jury. https://t.co/pC7M20ECsO

— The Associated Press (@AP) September 24, 2020

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Reader Interactions

8Comments

  1. 1.

    sdhays

    October 4, 2020 at 3:57 pm

    Lawyers for Kyle Rittenhouse have raised nearly $2 million for his defense by depicting the alleged Kenosha shooter as an American hero. Some legal experts say that rhetoric may draw donors, but it could hurt the teen’s chances before a jury.

    At least the lawyers will get paid.

    What a sick country.

  2. 2.

    cope

    October 4, 2020 at 4:44 pm

    I can’t read the rest of the story because $$$ but I probably wouldn’t if I could.  Beyond the facts of this situation, it’s equally appalling that it has taken more than a month for this to become general knowledge.

  3. 3.

    Amir Khalid

    October 4, 2020 at 5:08 pm

    Depravity. How else could you describe it?

  4. 4.

    Hildebrand

    October 4, 2020 at 5:25 pm

    I look forward to this little fascist getting thrown into a small cell for the rest of his days – and then I want him to be forgotten, other than as example of catastrophic villainy.

  5. 5.

    J R in WV

    October 4, 2020 at 5:35 pm

    I expect the shooter will have a couple of trials with hung juries, and then it will be dropped.

    it can be really hard to convince 12 people of anything, let alone that the defendant committed a heinous crime. Or not, that they were not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

    I spent hours in a jury room which was stuck on 11-1 for acquittal  — NOT the same as not guilty at all — until we finally convinced the hold out that 11 people thinking that there was reasonable doubt probably meant that there was reasonable doubt. On December 27th.

    Later on I learned from his cousin that the hold out guy had been on a jury some years before, voted for acquittal in a case, and learned later of information excluded from the trial, and swore he would never vote to acquit again. Still not sure how we convinced him.

  6. 6.

    brantl

    October 4, 2020 at 5:48 pm

    I really hope that this parent can be charged as an accessory to reckless endangerment. And I hope she is.

  7. 7.

    dopey-o

    October 5, 2020 at 12:06 am

    If you go to rittenhouse’s mother’s house you should look in her closet and find a brown shirt with a badge sewn to it, which reads Hitler Jugend.

  8. 8.

    Frank Zappa In Hot Plate Heaven

    October 5, 2020 at 8:21 am

    Domestic Terrorist Kyle Rittenhouse will be tried and convicted as an adult spending at a minimum 30 years in a Federal Pen for hate crimes…

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