Boston Globe: A grisly blueprint of Terror - Charlottesville car attack four years ago foreshadowed a summer of violence in 2020
By: Integrity First For America News Coverage
By Jazmine Ulloa, Boston Globe. Read the full article here.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — The violent clashes between white supremacists and racial justice protesters had not yet swept through this old college town when, in May 2017, James Alex Fields Jr. sent a bit of twisted humor to his friend on Instagram.
It was a photograph of a dark gray Dodge Challenger ramming into a group of cyclists, their bikes and bodies tossed into the air. “PROTEST,” read a white block of text, “BUT I’M LATE FOR WORK!!”
When I see protesters blocking,” Fields, then 20, added, tapping his grisly threat onto his iPhone from somewhere in the small town of Maumee, Ohio, where he lived just southwest of Toledo.
Three months later, on a cool night in August, Fields climbed into his own Dodge Challenger and drove the nine hours to Charlottesville. He arrived before dawn and hung around the empty city before eventually making his way to a downtown park, where he joined the white supremacists, Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and members of other far right-wing groups rallying to consolidate the US white power movement and denounce the planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Hundreds of counter-protesters responded with their own show of solidarity, leading to skirmishes and chaos that morning. But by the early afternoon, police officers had broken up the event, and people waving Black Lives Matter signs and LGBTQ flags streamed into the bright, summer light, feeling victorious. As they rounded Fourth Street, marching past old, brick buildings to a pedestrian mall lined with cafes and restaurants, they chanted, “Whose streets? Our streets!”
Farther up the hill, Fields waited. He watched for about a minute before he slowly backed up, shifted his car into gear, and barreled straight into the crowd, his tires screeching against the pavement.
Marcus Martin looked up from his cellphone just in time to push his fiancée, Marissa, out of the way before he was flung upward. Alexis Morris was struck so suddenly by the car, and with such force, that she thought a bomb had exploded. She was knocked to the ground, with a badly broken leg...
“...There has been so little scrutiny and accountability when it comes to these cases that so often we chalk them up to isolated incidents and refuse to see the pattern,” said Amy Spitalnick, executive director of Integrity First for America, a nonprofit funding the case against Spencer and other rally organizers. “These attacks aren’t accidents. They’re intended to instill terror in people and communities.”