Somber protests after night of chaos, shootings
KENOSHA, WIS. » Groups that had taken to Kenosha’s streets with long guns were nowhere to be seen early Thursday following somber protests and no widespread unrest for the first night since the weekend police shooting of Jacob Blake.
Marchers were solemn during Wednesday night’s protests in the southeastern Wisconsin city between Milwaukee and Chicago following the chaos of the previous night, when authorities say a 17-yearold from a nearby Illinois community fatally shot two demonstrators and wounded a third.
“Last night was very peaceful,” said Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth during a Thursday news conference during which he and other city leaders refused to answer questions. “Tuesday night, not quite so peaceful, but it wasn’t too bad.”
It was Tuesday night when two protesters were killed in the street in shootings largely caught on cellphone video and posted online. A sheriff’s department spokesman did not immediately return a message seeking clarity on Beth’s comment.
The attack late Tuesday and the shooting by police Sunday of Blake, a 29-yearold Black father of six who was left paralyzed from the waist down, made Kenosha the latest focal point in the fight against racial injustice that has gripped the country since the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.
Kenosha police faced questions about their interactions with the gunman on Tuesday night. According to witness accounts and video footage, police apparently let the gunman walk past them and leave the scene with a rifle over his shoulder and his hands in the air as members of the crowd yelled for him to be arrested because he had shot people.
As for how the gunman managed to slip away, Beth has described the chaotic, high-stress scene, with lots of radio traffic and people screaming, chanting and running, conditions he said can cause “tunnel vision” among law officers.
Video taken before the shooting shows police tossing bottled water from an armored vehicle and thanking civilians armed with long guns walking the streets. One of them appears to be the gunman. a friend.
“I couldn’t take it anymore,” he said. “I couldn’t just sit there and watch my friend die.”
The two men who were killed were Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, of Kenosha, and Anthony Huber, 26, of Silver Lake, about 15 miles west of the city.
A third man was injured. Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, was volunteering as a medic when he was shot, said Bethany Crevensten who was also among the group of about two dozen activists.
“He was a hero and he is a hero,” she said.
Grosskreutz, of West Allis, about 30 miles northwest of Kenosha, was recovering after surgery and not giving interviews, Crevensten said.
Blake was shot in the back seven times Sunday as he leaned into his SUV, in which three of his children were seated.
State authorities identified on Wednesday the officer who shot Blake as Rusten Sheskey, a sevenyear veteran of the Kenosha Police Department.
Authorities said Sheskey was among officers who responded to a domestic dispute, though they have not said whether Blake was part of the dispute. Sheskey shot Blake while holding onto his shirt after officers unsuccessfully used a Taser, the Wisconsin Justice Department said. State agents later recovered a knife from the floor on the driver’s side of the vehicle, the department said. State authorities did not say Blake threatened anyone with a knife.
Ben Crump, the lawyer for Blake’s family, said Tuesday that it would “take a miracle” for Blake to walk again. He called for the arrest of Sheskey and for the others involved to lose their jobs.