Day four of the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse continued Thursday, Nov. 4, with more witness testimony.
Kyle Rittenhouse, the young, aspiring police officer who shot three people while they were out on the streets of Kenosha during a protest against racial injustice last year.
On Wednesday at the Kenosha County Courthouse, Dave Hancock, who is serving as the Rittenhouse family’s media liaison, told The Daily Wire, “I think it’s going well. I think a lot of truths are coming out right now.”
According to Hancock, The family of Kyle Rittenhouse is staying “upbeat.”
“They’re staying upbeat. They’re doing well. It’s obviously stressful, especially reliving that for Kyle, but they’re doing okay.”
On Monday, Rittenhouse’s mother and both of his sisters came for the first day of the trial, and on Wednesday, his mother and one of his sisters were present.
Rittenhouse, 18, is charged with possessing a firearm as a minor, a misdemeanor, in addition to counts of intentional, reckless, and attempted homicide, and reckless endangerment, and curfew violation but his attorneys say it was a “Self-defense.”
On Tuesday, a friend testified that Mr. Rittenhouse called him “freaking out” moments after the shootings and told him he had to shoot because “people were trying to hurt him”.
Prosecutors will argue the Illinois native came looking for trouble that night. Mr. Rittenhouse has pleaded not guilty.
On 25 August 2020, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse traveled from his home in Antioch, Illinois to Kenosha, in neighboring Wisconsin, and picked up an AR-style semiautomatic rifle from a friend.
The teen was responding to a call on social media for armed Americans to help protect property from unrest on the streets.
Local officials had declared a state of emergency two days earlier amid mass protests and street unrest over the shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man. The incident came just three months after a national outcry over the police murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, in Minneapolis.
Bystander video captures Mr. Rittenhouse being chased into the car park of a used car dealership by Joseph Rosenbaum, 36.
Moments later, unseen on video, Mr. Rittenhouse fires four times and kills Rosenbaum.
As he runs down the street away from the scene, Mr. Rittenhouse falls and multiple people converge upon him.
Anthony Huber, 26, hits him in the head and neck with a skateboard. Mr. Rittenhouse kills him with a bullet to the stomach.
Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, approaches him with a pistol in hand. Mr. Rittenhouse wounds him with a shot in the arm.
All three victims were white.
Hancock said Rittenhouse’s family remains firm in their conviction that he was fired to defend himself.
“This is pure, unadulterated self-defense, Everything else that the media have been reporting for the past year is noise,” Hancock said.
He went on to claim that many of the rumors swirling around Rittenhouse are unfounded.
“He was accused of being a white supremacist, of being in a militia, of answering a call to arms. None of that was true from the very beginning,” he said. “But it didn’t stop the media from perpetuating the same sorry story about him being associated with some extremist group. It’s just factually untrue.”
Hancock also asserted that Rittenhouse was charged “without any meaningful investigation in the first place.”
“Had they done a meaningful investigation I believe that we wouldn’t be sitting in this courtroom right now,” he said.
During Wednesday’s trial, the prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger, clashed with Judge Bruce Schroeder over video evidence the prosecution wanted to play for the jury.
Rittenhouse’s attorneys objected that the person who took one of the videos of events leading up to the shooting was editorializing in his narration. The judge argued with the prosecution for several minutes before deciding that the video could be played but must be muted for most of the time.
Hancock called the move to include the audio “par for the course” for the prosecutor “since day one of the charges.”
“The comfort that we have is we know Kyle. And we know what he was doing, what kind of kid he actually is,” Hancock said.
Sources: Dailywire, Uelresins, Yahoo