Kenosha shooter portrayed as patriot
The way lawyers for Kyle Rittenhouse tell it, he wasn’t just a scared teenager acting in self-defense when he shot to death two Kenosha, Wis., protesters. He was a courageous defender of liberty, a patriot exercising his right to bear arms amid rioting in the streets.
“A 17-year-old citizen is being sacrificed by politicians, but it’s not Kyle Rittenhouse they are after. Their end game is to strip away the constitutional right of all citizens to defend our communities,” says the voice-over at the end of a video released this week by a group tied to Rittenhouse’s legal team.
“Kyle Rittenhouse will go down in American history alongside that brave unknown patriot… who fired ‘The Shot Heard Round the World,’ ” lead attorney John Pierce wrote in a tweet he later deleted.
But such dramatic rhetoric that has helped raise nearly $2 million for Rittenhouse’s defensemay notwork with a jury considering charges that could put the teen in prison for life.
Rittenhouse’s high-profile defense and fundraising teams, led by Los Angelesbased Pierce andatlanta attorney Lin Wood, respectively, refused to speak about their strategy ahead of the teen’s next court appearance Friday, a hearing in Illinois on whether to return him towisconsin.
But in a TV appearance and social media posts, they doubled down on the hero theme, describing Kenosha as a “war zone” and the young shooter as an “American patriot.”
Rittenhousewas arrested in his hometown of Antioch, Ill., a day after the Aug. 25 shootings that came amid raucous protests in Kenosha over the police shooting that paralyzed a Black man, Jacob Blake. Rittenhouse, who is white, was charged with first-degree intentional homicide in the killing of two white protesters and attempted intentional homicide in the wounding of a third.
According to prosecutors, Rittenhouse shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, after the protester threwa plastic bag at the teenager, missing him.
Rittenhouse, in Pierce’s telling, fired only after Rosenbaum began to “assault him from behind” and attempted to take his rifle away.