New York Daily News

$3M death suit vs. hate rally chiefs

SHAME OF OUR NATION

- Charlottes­ville unrest began with tiki-torchlit march (top left) at University of Virginia on Friday night, then spread into even uglier protest on Saturday (near left and main photo) as white supremacis­ts carried their hateful message to the streets. BY

named Heather Heyer with his car.

This was a New York City homecoming for Trump seven months into his presidency. This is his idea of making America great again, four days after this began with neo-Nazis and bigots with torches in their hands, not feeling as if they needed white robes because they were clearly unafraid to show their faces, chanting about Jews and how whites will not be replaced in their sick and bastardize­d view of America.

“Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me,” Donald Trump said in the middle of the most diverse city in the world, a monument to diversity. “Not all of those people were white supremacis­ts by any stretch.”

But what else were they if they marched with white supremacis­ts and chanted with them and had their faces lit by these torches?

So what started in Charlottes­ville ended on Fifth Ave. The President said that he didn’t say more on Saturday, in his initial statement about what happened in Charlottes­ville, because he didn’t have all the facts. As if that has ever stopped him, whether he was talking about terrorism in London or calling an arson attack in the Philippine­s an act of terror.

And when he finally did reach a conclusion about Charlottes­ville, and the events that ultimately led to the death of a young woman who died for doing the right thing in the face of alt-right terrorism, it was this conclusion:

“You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.”

Before long, of course, he was praised by David Duke, the grand wizard of hate and bigotry and white supremacy in this country.

“Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottes­ville,” Duke wrote on Twitter.

Trump was praised by Duke, and by the worst precincts of America, and the fanboys of the bullhorn media, part of a pep rally immediatel­y organized because Trump came out swinging this way, playing to his base to the end, at Trump Tower, a place that can only be called Charlottes­ville North.

“They had a permit,” the President said, as if that somehow justified this march out of the past and into the violence and chaos of Saturday afternoon.

There aren’t two sides to the story in Charlottes­ville, the way there aren’t two sides to what we witnessed from President Donald Trump in the building that is a monument to himself, in a moment that already feels like a monument to a looming civil war, in our government and in our country. Trump came out swinging on this day, he sure did, at his critics and the media, and as he did, he gave you the idea that he was the one driving an out-of-control car, through the lobby of Trump Tower. Or a bus. TWO VIRGINIA sisters wounded in the Charlottes­ville car attack filed a $3 million lawsuit Tuesday against the Nazisympat­hizing motorist and several alt-right leaders.

Tadrint Washington and Micah Washington say in court papers that they were sitting in a car on Saturday when James Fields Jr. plowed into a crowd of people and struck their vehicle.

The force of the crash caused the sisters to slam into the dashboard and windshield, resulting in “serious injuries” to their heads and extremitie­s, the suit says.

“God really saved us,” Tadrint Washington told the local NBC affiliate.

The attack, following a series of skirmishes between the racist demonstrat­ors and counter-protesters, killed a 32-year-old paralegal and wounded a total of 19 others.

The siblings, who were sitting inside Tadrint’s 2005 Toyota Camry, were only in the area because detours diverted them from their typical route home. They did not participat­e in the rally or counter protest, the suit says.

“Fields is a racist, violent and hateful person who sought to kill innocent people, including plaintiffs, in order to further a message of hate, intoleranc­e and to instill terror in and intimidate all those who oppose the Alt-right’s vision of a racist intolerant society,” the suit says.

The suit also names Jason Kessler, who organized the rally at Emancipati­on Park, along with Richard Spencer, David Duke and several other white supremacis­ts and alt-right groups.

The sisters claim that the “Unite the Right” organizers incited a riot and were reckless in “assisting Fields in his effort to commit violence for the purpose of furthering the shared conspirato­rial goal of their organizati­on.”

Charged with second-degree murder, the 20-year-old Fields was remanded Monday to a local jail.

“Defendants knew or should have known that the reasonably foreseeabl­e outcome of inciting violence and providing material assistance to rallygoers, including Fields, was an attack upon citizens and counterpro­testers,” the suit says.

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