A former spokesperson for Kyle Rittenhouse says he became disillusioned with his ex-client after learning that he had sent text messages pledging to “fucking murder” shoplifters outside a pharmacy before later shooting two people to death during racial justice protests in Wisconsin in 2020.
Dave Hancock made that remark about Rittenhouse – for whom he also worked as a security guard – on a Law & Crime documentary that premiered on Friday. The show explored the unsuccessful criminal prosecution of Rittenhouse, who killed Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
As Hancock told it on The Trials of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 90-minute film’s main subject had “a history of things he was doing prior to [the double slaying], specifically patrolling the street for months with guns and borrowing people’s security uniforms, doing whatever he could to try to get into some kind of a fight”.
Hancock nonetheless said he initially believed Rittenhouse’s claims of self-defense when he first relayed his story about fatally shooting Rosenbaum and Huber. Yet that changed when he later became aware of text messages that surfaced as part of a civil lawsuit filed by the family of one of the men slain in Kenosha demanding wrongful death damages from Rittenhouse.
I mean he did, but he both didn’t know that at the time and it’s not relevant to the goings on that night.
I’m just going to lead with this: he’s an idiot, and in an ideal world he would have not been in Kenosha that night at all.
That said, if you followed the trial and the evidence presented, it very obviously fit the definition of self defense.
I wish them the best in their civil trial, but unless they’re relying very hard on civil trials having a lower standard of evidence, are getting criminal trial evidence excluded, or are including new evidence not part of the criminal trial that makes a massive difference they probably won’t win.
Shooting Rosenbaum will likely have the easiest time if they can pay an ME to give contradictory expert testimony to what came from the criminal trial. Because while it’s on camera, you can’t clearly see what went on with their hands and the gun in the video, and have to rely on the ME and testimony to fill in the gaps.
Getting wrongful death civil damages for someone shooting someone who knocked them to the ground and was coming at them with a blunt object will be harder, but not as hard as for Grosskreutz, unless he can bar his criminal trial testimony from the civil case or come up with an excuse why his answers don’t mean what they appear to.