By
Allegra Kirkland | March 16, 2018 2:45 pm
A
black man violently attacked at last summer’s white nationalist rally in
Charlottesville was acquitted Friday on charges that he assaulted one of the
racists in attendance.
DeAndre
Harris was found not guilty on a misdemeanor charge of assault and battery
against Harold Crews, the North Carolina chairman of the neo-Confederate hate
group League of the South, The Washington Post reported.
The
verdict brings an end to a legal rollercoaster for Harris, a 20-year-old former
special education teaching assistant, who was pummeled with flagsticks, shields,
and pieces of wood by a crowd of white supremacists at the August 2017 “Unite
the Right” rally.
Video
of the parking garage assault on Harris went viral, prompting outrage and a
flood of donations to help cover medical bills for his injuries, which included
a spinal injury and head lacerations.
Four
of the white nationalists who assaulted Harris are currently awaiting
trial.
Months
later, in October, Crews filed a police report and persuaded a Charlottesville
magistrate to issue an arrest warrant against Harris on a felony charge of
unlawful wounding. As TPM previously reported, this was made possible thanks to
an odd statute in the Virginia state code that allows private citizens to
initiate the process of obtaining a warrant.
The
charge was later downgraded to a misdemeanor, which would have resulted in a
maximum sentence of 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine.
The
case was based on a few short, chaotic moments of video. In one clip posted on
YouTube, Crews and a friend of Harris’ are pulling on either end of a large
flagpole. Harris cuts in and appears to swing a flashlight in Crews’ direction.
Within minutes, he is chased through the garage and wrestled to the ground,
where the brutal beating commences.
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