Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Virginia driver previously accused of beating mom
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — The driver charged with killing a woman counter-protester at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville was previously accused of beating his mother and threatening her with a knife, according to police records released Monday.
Samantha Bloom, who is disabled and uses a wheelchair, repeatedly called police about her son, James Alex Fields Jr., in 2010 and 2011, telling officers he was on medication to control his temper, transcripts from 911 calls show.
Fields, 20, is accused of ramming his car into a crowd of counter-protesters on Saturday in Charlottesville, killing 32year-old Heather Heyer.
Fields, described by a former high school teacher as an admirer of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, was charged with seconddegree murder.
A judge denied him bail Monday after the public defender’s office said it couldn’t represent him because a relative of someone in the office was injured in Saturday’s protest.
Fields was assigned a local attorney, and another hearing was set for Aug. 25.
Records show that Fields was arrested and put in juvenile detention after his mother reported in 2011 that he stood behind her wielding a 12-inch knife.
In another incident in 2010, she said her son smacked her in the head and locked her in the bathroom after she told him to stop playing video games. There was no indication in the records that he was arrested.
Also Monday, a former classmate told The Associated Press that on a school trip to Europe in 2015, a teenage Fields couldn’t stand the French and said he only went on the trip so that he could visit “the Fatherland” — Germany.
“He just really laid on about the French being lower than us and inferior to us,” said Keegan McGrath.
McGrath, now 18, said he challenged Fields on his beliefs, and the animosity between them grew so heated that it came to a boil at dinner on their second day. He said he went home after three or four days because he couldn’t handle being in a room with Fields.
The incident shocked McGrath because he had been in German class with Fields for two unremarkable years.
“He was just a normal dude” most of the time, though he occasionally made “dark” jokes that put his class on edge, including one “offhand joke” about the Holocaust, McGrath said.
McGrath said Fields was no outcast: “He had friends. He had people who would chat with him.”
A teacher who taught Fields in high school said Sunday that Fields was fascinated with Nazism, idolized Hitler, and had been singled out in the ninth grade by officials at Randall K. Cooper High School in Union, Ky., for his “deeply held, radical” convictions on race.
Fields also confided that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was younger and had been prescribed an antipsychotic medication, according to the teacher, Derek Weimer.
Weimer said Fields left school for a while, and when he came back he was quieter about politics until his senior year, when politicians started to declare their candidacy for the 2016 presidential race. Weimer said Fields was a big Trump supporter because of what he believed to be Trump’s views on race.
As a senior, Fields wanted to join the Army, and Weimer, a former officer in the Ohio National Guard, guided him through the process of applying, he said, believing that the military would expose Fields to people of different races and backgrounds and help him dispel his white supremacist views.
But Fields was ultimately turned down, which was a big blow, Weimer said. Weimer said he lost contact with Fields after he graduated and was surprised to hear reports that Fields had enlisted in the Army.
McGrath said Fields wanted to become a tank commander in the Army.
Army spokeswoman Lt. Col. Jennifer Johnson said Fields reported for basic military training in August 2015 but was released from active duty four months later “due to a failure to meet training standards.”
Fields had been photographed hours before the attack with a shield bearing the emblem of Vanguard America, one of the hate groups that took part in the protest against the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The group on Sunday denied any association with Fields.