During a news conference Wednesday, Kenosha police chief Daniel Miskinis said the shooting may not have happened if protesters and the accused gunman had followed the city.
newly added 8 hour departure trip.
“Everyone involved was after the exit traffic,” Miskinis said. “I will not make much of it, but the point is – the starting point is too much to protect. If individuals were not involved in conflict with that, the situation that developed him would not have happened.”
CNN has reached out to the Kenosha Police Department for further comment.
The “situation” was a shooting that killed two people early Wednesday morning and seriously injured another. Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old from Antioch, Illinois, is accused of one single shooting incident. Police have not said who is responsible for committing all the shootings, and they have not given details about the incident that Rittenhouse is accused of.
READ MORE: The Kenosha shooting suspect is a former member of a youth police cadet program, Illinois police say
Kenosha, Wisconsin, has become the epicenter of nationwide protests against police brutality after an officer shot Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, seven times in the back from close range while three of his children were seen from his car.
Blake survived the shooting, and is being treated at a local hospital for his injuries. His father, also known as Jacob Blake, told CNN that his son is paralyzed from the waist down, although he is not sure if the paralysis is permanent.
At Wednesday’s conference, Miskinis claimed that police were not responsible for the fatal shooting that killed a 26-year-old and a 36-year-old.
“This is not a police action,” he said. “This is not the action, I believe, of those who set out to protest. It is the people who were involved after the legal time, involved in illegal activity, who brought violence to this community.”
During his show on Wednesday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson appeared to defend the 17-year-old accused of the murder, saying that while authorities “stood back and watched as Kenosha burned,” the accused youth tried to “keep order.”
“How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with guns decided they had to keep order like no one else would?” Carlson asked on his program.
Carlson was widely criticized for appearing to praise vigilantism and “justify murder.” He made earlier inflammatory remarks about the Black Lives Matter movement earlier this summer.
CNN’s Konstantin Toropin and Oliver Darcy contributed to this report.
.
Related
