Self-professed neo-Nazi accused in fatal rally was ‘filled with anger,’ prosecution says
Charlottesville, Va. — In May 2017, three months before he rammed his speeding Dodge Challenger into a group of counterprotesters during a violent white supremacists rally here, self-professed neo-Nazi James Fields Jr. posted photos on Instagram of “a car running into a crowd of people,” a prosecutor revealed in court Thursday.
As Fields’ murder trial got underway after three days of jury selection, Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Nina-Alice Antony said the prosecution would prove that Fields acted with premeditation, an essential element of the first-degree murder charge against him.
“This isn’t about what he did,” she told the panel in her opening statement, noting that Fields does not deny driving into the crowd. “It’s about what his intent was.”
One of Fields’ attorneys, in his opening remarks, said the defense would show that Fields acted out of fear of the counterprotesters and not with criminal malice.
“This is not a whodunit case,” lawyer John Hill told the jury, acknowledging that Fields, now 21, “operated his motor vehicle in such a way as it caused a death and some serious injuries.” He was referring to counterprotester Heather Heyer, 32, who was killed, and 35 surviving victims who were hurt, several of them grievously.
Although he did not mention “self-defense” in his opening statement, and he did not specify why his client was purportedly in fear before the crash, Hill earlier told prospective jurors, “There will be evidence that [Fields] took these actions in an attempt to defend himself.”
Antony, in focusing her remarks on premeditation, seemed to expect that the central issue in the trial will be Fields’ state of mind on Aug. 12, 2017, the day of the rally.
The first victim to testify Thursday, Marcus Martin, sobbed on the witness stand in Charlottesville Circuit Court as he described pushing his then-fiancee, Marissa Blair, out of the path of the oncoming Challenger. Blair and Heyer were friends who worked together as paralegals at a local law firm. Martin, who is now married to Blair, was standing with the two women in the crowd of counterprotesters in downtown Charlottesville.
“She was a great person,” Martin said of Heyer, before he broke down emotionally and asked for time to compose himself.
In the early afternoon that day, Fields stopped his 2010 Dodge Challenger near the crowd at 4th and Water streets.
Authorities said he then backed up for more than a block before bolting forward at a high speed, crashing into another vehicle at the corner and propelling victims into the air.
The hours of violence in Charlottesville that day, which climaxed with a deadly act of alleged automotive rage, stunned the national conscience and helped make “Charlottesville” a shorthand term for the emergence of emboldened white supremacists in the early months of the Donald Trump administration.