Neo-Nazi supporter found guilty of protester’s murder

Ohio man killed woman, hurt 35 by driving into a crowd.

An CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. — avowed supporter of neoNazi beliefs who took part in the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in this city last year was found guilty Friday of first-degree murder for killing a woman by ramming his car through a crowd of counterprotesters.

A jury of seven women and five men began deliberating Friday morning and took just over seven hours to reach its decision that James Fields Jr., 21, of Maumee, Ohio, acted with premedita- tion when he backed up his 2010 Dodge Challenger and then roared it down a narrow downtown street crowded with counterprotesters, slam- ming into them and another car. Heather Heyer, 32, was killed and 35 others injured, many grievously.

The deadly attack in the early afternoon of Aug. 12, 2017, culminated a dark 24 hours in this quiet college town. It was marked by a torchlight march through the University of Virginia campus the night before, with participants shouting racist and anti-Semitic insults, and wild street battles on the morning of the planned rally between white supremacists and those opposing them.

Fields’ conviction followed six days of testimony in Char- lottesville Circuit Court, where Heyer’s deadly inju- ries were detailed and survivors of the crash described the chaos and their own injuries. Jeanne Peterson, 38, who limped to the witness stand with the help of bailiffs, said she’d had five surgeries and would have another next year. Wednesday Bowie, a counterprotester in her 20s, said her pelvis was broken in six places. Marcus Martin described pushing his then-fi- ancee out of the Challenger’s path before he was struck.

Susan Bro, Heyer’s mother, sat near the front of the crowded courtroom every day watching the proceedings overseen by Judge Richard Moore. Fields’ mother, Samantha Bloom, sat in her wheelchair on the other side, an island in a sea of her son’s victims and their supporters.

For both prosecutors and Fields’ defense lawyers, the case was always about intent. Defense attorneys Denise Lunsford and John Hill did not deny Fields drove the car that killed Heyer and injured dozens. But they said it was not out of malice, rather out of fear for his own safety and confusion. They said he regretted his actions imme- diately, and pointed to his repeated professions of sor- row shortly after his arrest and his uncontrollable sob- bing when he learned of the injuries and death he caused.

“He wasn’t angry, he was scared,” Lunsford told the jury in her closing argument.

Early in the trial the defense said there would be testimony from witnesses concerning Fields’ mental health, but those witnesses were never brought forward.

Prosecutors, though, said Fields was enraged when he drove more than 500 miles from his apartment in Ohio to take part in the rally — and later chose to act on that anger by ramming his car into the crowd. They described Fields “idling, watching” in his Challenger on Fourth Street and surveying a crowd of marchers that was celebrating the cancellation of the planned rally.

They showed video and presented witnesses testifying that there was no one around Fields’ car when he slowly backed it up the street and then raced it forward down the hill into the unsuspecting crowd. In her final address to the jury Thursday, Senior-Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Nina-Alice Antony showed a close-up of Fields in his car to rebut the idea that he was frightened when he acted.

“This is not the face of someone who is scared,” she said. “This is the face of anger, of hatred. It’s the face of malice.”

Jurors were shown a now-deleted Instagram post that Fields shared three months before the crash. “You Have the Right to Protest, But I’m Late for Work,” read the post, accompanied by an image of a car running into a group of people.

Jurors also saw a text exchange shortly before the rally in which Fields told his mother he was planning to attend, and she told him to be careful. “We’re not the one who need to be careful,” Fields replied in a misspelled text message. He included an attachment: a meme showing Adolf Hitler.