Like other cell phone videos of police officers shooting or killing Black men, the 22-second clip of Officer Rusten Sheskey firing into Blake’s back, filmed through the screen window of a neighbor’s apartment across the street, ricocheted around the internet.
But authorities’ refusal for days to confirm even the most basic details about Blake’s shooting created a vacuum of information — and even now, more than a week and a half after Blake was shot, the exact circumstances that led to his encounter with police are unclear. Officials said Sheskey and two other officers on the scene tried to tase Blake, who had an open warrant after being charged with sexual assault a month earlier, and that a knife was recovered in his car. The local police union has claimed that Blake was carrying the knife and that he struggled with officers, putting one in a headlock before the cell phone video starts.
But family and lawyers for Blake, who was left paralyzed from the waist down, say he was unarmed and was attending a birthday party for one of his kids. “They shot my son seven times. Seven times. Like he didn’t matter,” Jacob Blake Sr., Blake’s father, told reporters. “But my son matters. He’s a human being, and he matters.”
Racial inequalities have long festered in Kenosha
Few residents of Kenosha ever expected their hometown to join the list of American cities whose names have become buzzwords for police violence and unrest.
The Blake shooting has highlighted deep-seated racial inequities that have long festered below the surface of Kenosha’s sleepy Midwestern charm. A third of Black people in Kenosha County live in poverty, about 40% of adult Black men are unemployed, and Black people face an incarceration rate 12 times that of White people, according to an analysis by Marc Levine, the director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for Economic Development.
The economic and criminal justice disparities between Black and White people in southeastern Wisconsin are “among the widest” in the United States, he said.
Two years older than Blake, Rusten Sheskey was following in the footsteps of his own grandfather, who served as a longtime Kenosha police officer.
Sheskey has spent seven years on the Kenosha force, which he joined after working as an officer at the local UW-Parkside campus. As a police officer, he pedaled around the city as part of the bike patrol and walked the shopping mall beat during the holidays. He’d occasionally bring a squad car home from work and turn on the siren for neighborhood kids, one neighbor recalled.
Police and city officials have not responded to public records requests for Sheskey’s history with the department, including any previous uses of force or disciplinary issues. According to a city memo, Sheskey received a one-day suspension in 2017 for a violation regarding “safe operation of department vehicles.”
Other efforts to push for police reform in Kenosha have fallen short. In 2017, the city council unanimously approved a measure calling for police to wear body cameras, but the purchase of cameras was delayed until 2022 due to a budget shortage — leaving investigators lacking a crucial record of what transpired between Blake and the officers.
What we know about the shooting
In late May, Kenosha police were called to a low-slung apartment building not far from the former Chrysler plant. According to court documents, a woman told officers that Blake had broken into her house and sexually assaulted her before leaving with her car and debit card, and that he had previously assaulted her “around twice a year” over the past eight years. She did not respond to requests for comment from CNN.
Blake was charged with third degree sexual assault and domestic abuse in July, and a judge approved a warrant for his arrest.
A month later, on Sunday, August 23, police were sent to the same address after receiving another 911 call from a woman who said Blake had taken her keys and was not supposed to be on the premises. A dispatcher informed the officers responding that Blake had an open warrant — but it’s unclear if they knew any of the details, or whether the woman who called police was the same person who accused Blake of sexual assault.
Officers were sent to the apartment at 5:11 p.m. and arrived at the apartment two minutes later, according to police dispatch audio. Just before 5:16 p.m., Sheskey opened fire.
The state Department of Justice, which is investigating the shooting, has released only a barebones sketch of what took place in the intervening minutes: Sheskey and two other officers on the scene tried to arrest Blake and tased him twice, without success. Blake then walked around a car, followed by Sheskey, as the neighbor’s video shows. As he opened the car door and leaned down, Sheskey grabbed Blake’s shirt and fired seven shots into his back.
Blake, who was airlifted to a Milwaukee hospital, later told investigators that he had had a knife in his possession, and a knife was found on the floor of the car, according to the DOJ.
Blake’s lawyers say Blake never represented a threat to officers and that he was trying to get his three sons out of a “volatile situation.” His kids, age three, five and eight, were in the backseat of the car.
The local police union, meanwhile, has claimed that Blake forcefully fought officers, putting one in a headlock. In a statement, a lawyer for the union said Blake held the knife and did not comply with officers’ commands to drop it during the altercation.
Both sides claim that video vindicates their dueling narratives. The union insisted that pausing the viral video at the right frame would show Blake holding the knife — although the clump of pixels shown in his hand could also be car keys. His lawyer Benjamin Crump, meanwhile, told CNN that “when you look at the video, he posed no threat to those officers as he was walking away from them,” and said there is additional video that will be released that will “clear all this up.”
Even though his legs were paralyzed, Blake was handcuffed to his hospital bed, which his family said added insult to injury. His shackles were removed late last week when the district attorney vacated the warrant in the assault case, although Blake still faces criminal charges.4
As authorities flail in spotlight, a ‘call to arms’ emerges
As Blake fought for his life in the Milwaukee hospital, the video of his shooting spread across social media like wildfire.
State leaders like Gov. Tony Evers and Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes raced to denounce the shooting.
In one car lot on Sheridan Road, nearly every vehicle was a charred wreck. Most downtown businesses boarded up their storefronts, with some painting messages like “kids live upstairs” or “Black-owned business” on the plyboards covering their windows.
Kevin Mathewson, a former Kenosha alderman, said he started the group after concluding that law enforcement was “outnumbered.”
“I figured with citizens taking up arms, the epitome of the need for the Second Amendment, we wouldn’t be outnumbered,” he told CNN in a phone interview. “It was simply a call to arms: ‘Hey, if you’re sick of your community burning down and you’re a law-abiding citizen, take up arms and defend our community.'”
It’s unclear how many people were actually drawn to the city by the Facebook event. But a contingent of men carrying military-style rifles were present during protests, patrolling the streets and standing on the roof of one damaged building.
Teen’s night at protest ends with ‘I just killed somebody’
Just as in police officers’ encounter with Blake, many of the details surrounding the fatal shooting amid the chaotic protests are still unclear, and political actors have used the confusion to push their own narratives. But there’s no dispute that 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse fired the shots that killed two protesters and injured a third.
Rittenhouse was living in Antioch, Illinois, about a half hour drive from Kenosha through farm fields and country roads that straddle the border between the two states. His connection to Kenosha is unclear — while his lawyer has claimed he worked as a lifeguard at a local pool and was helping a local business owner defend their property, CNN could not independently verify those claims.
Numerous videos taken during the protests show Rittenhouse, wearing a green T-shirt and a backward baseball cap and carrying an AR-15-style rifle, walking the city’s streets with a group of armed men.
As Rosenbaum lay on the ground, the complaint says, Rittenhouse ran away while calling a friend and telling them, “I just killed somebody.” He was pursued by protesters, and then tripped and fell to the ground.
While he was on the ground, Rittenhouse shot Anthony Huber, who appeared to hit him with a skateboard, according to the complaint, and then shot a third protester approaching him, Gaige Grosskreutz, in the right arm. Grosskreutz was holding a handgun but had his hands up, the complaint says.
Court documents show that Rittenhouse had a troubled family life as he bounced between apartments and school districts across the northern Chicago suburbs. When he was four years old, his father was charged with four counts of domestic battery after allegedly hitting his mother, in a case that prosecutors later dropped without providing details why. Rittenhouse’s parents also faced a string of lawsuits accusing them of failing to pay rent over the years, and he, his mother and two sisters were evicted from their apartment in February 2018, according to court documents.
As a middle schooler, Rittenhouse was bullied to the point that his mother asked a court to impose a “stalking no contact order” against two other teenagers who, she claimed in a hand-written 2017 petition, were threatening and cyberbullying him. A judge dismissed the case when she failed to show up for a hearing. Rittenhouse’s parents did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
In the days before he allegedly killed two people, a Snapchat account believed to belong to Rittenhouse posted demeaningly about Blake, screenshotting Blake’s mugshot and arrest record and captioning it “Lol yeah he’s innocent.”
The teenager was targeted “in a reactionary rush to appease the divisive, destructive forces currently roiling this country,” Pierce Bainbridge, one of his lawyers, wrote in a statement. Rittenhouse “defended himself, which is a fundamental right of all Americans given by God and protected by law,” Bainbridge said.
Others see the response to Rittenhouse as a chilling glorification of vigilante violence and an implicit confirmation of racial biases in policing. According to social media videos taken after the shooting, Kenosha officers drove by Rittenhouse as he walked toward them with his hands raised and protesters tried to tell them he was the shooter — a very different response from Sheskey opening fire on Blake.
“That white young man got a high-five and some water,” Blake, Sr. told CNN. “My son got seven to the back — hot ones through his back.”
‘He did not deserve to die’
Even as Biden and other Democrats have condemned both Blake’s shooting and the violence that followed, the unrest in Kenosha has become a potent symbol for Trump as he tries to redirect national attention from the coronavirus pandemic to issues of law and order with two months to go until Election Day.
Trump declined to meet with Blake’s family when he visited Kenosha because of their request to have lawyers present, and when asked by a reporter whether he believed there was systemic racism in the US, the president responded by changing the subject. “We should talk about the kind of violence that we’ve seen in Portland and here and other places,” he said. “It’s tremendous violence.” He seemed to defend Rittenhouse, saying the teenager “probably would have been killed” had he not shot two people.
Some Kenoshans said they were unhappy with how swiftly the shooting had become politicized. Cathy Broadway, an educational sign language interpreter who’s lived on the same block as Sheskey for almost two decades, stayed up late listening to a police scanner and sent her son to stay with family during the unrest.
Broadway, 46, who called the video of Blake’s shooting “horrific,” said she never imagined her city would find itself in the national spotlight.
“People call it Keno-where,” she said. “Now we can’t call it that because everyone knows where it is.”
Family and friends of Rosenbaum and Huber, the two men shot dead by Rittenhouse, are trying to pick up the pieces. Huber’s girlfriend, Hannah Gittings, told CNN that Huber was thinking about saving lives when he went to confront Rittenhouse with his skateboard.
“He loved this city ’cause it was his city, and he wanted to make it better and he wanted to stay in this house with me and my daughter and raise her here,” she said. “He did not deserve to die.”
Many residents have come together to help their city rebuild and heal, painting boarded-up storefronts with colorful homemade murals sharing messages like “love is the answer” and “Kenosha strong.”
As Trump toured burned-out businesses Tuesday, Blake’s family held a community block party at the intersection where he was shot. Activists registered voters and served up barbecue, while kids colored signs to hang in Blake’s hospital room.
Blake’s uncle Justin, wearing a black #JusticeForJacob mask, told attendees his nephew was in severe pain but “starting to slowly but surely get his vibrance back.”
“We’re going to rebuild our community,” Justin Blake declared. “We’re going to make some big changes that are going to affect all the little Jakes around this nation.”
CNN’s Scott Glover, Lucy Kafanov and Paul Murphy contributed to this report.
Source : Nbcnewyork