Emmy Rossum is condemning the actions of an armed 17-year-old who is charged with opening fire on those protesting in Kenosha, Wisconsin against the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Wednesday night, just hours after Kyle Rittenhouse was taken into police custody and charged in connection to the shooting, Rossum slammed his actions as a “cold blooded hateful murder.”
Crossing state lines with an assault rifle isn’t “protecting your home”. It’s cold blooded hateful murder.
— Emmy Rossum (@emmyrossum) August 27, 2020
Rittenhouse had crossed state lines to attend the third consecutive night of protests in the city, traveling approximately 20 miles from Antioch, Illinois with an AR-15 to Kenosha, where he was seen with a group of other armed counter-protesters there to protect a car lot. In a video interview with the Daily Caller prior to the shooting, the 17-year-old said that “people are getting injured and our job is to protect this business” and that his “job also is to protect people.” He claimed that he had brought the rifle with him to the protest to protect others as well as himself.
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Shortly after, at around midnight, the shooting occurred. Video from the incident, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, showed what appeared to be a White man with a semi-automatic rifle shoot a protester in the head in a parking lot. That man then ran off. Other videos showed the man running down Sheridan Road as people chase him. He trips and falls to the ground and then opens fire, shooting one person in the abdomen and another in the arm. Authorities have not released the names of the victims who died, though they confirmed the two killed were a 26-year-old man from the Kenosha County community of Silver Lake and a 36-year-old Kenosha man. Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, of West Allis was shot in the arm and is expected to survive.
“We were all chanting ‘Black lives matter’ at the gas station and then we heard, boom, boom, and I told my friend, ‘That’s not fireworks,’” Devin Scott, who attended the protest, told the Chicago Tribune. “And then this guy with this huge gun runs by us in the middle of the street and people are yelling, ‘He shot someone! He shot someone!’ And everyone is trying to fight the guy, chasing him, and then he started shooting again.”
After the shooting, video showed the armed man walking away and toward police, who allowed him to walk past them. Although police have not confirmed if Rittenhouse is the person in these videos, Rittenhouse was taken into police custody in Illinois on suspicion of first-degree intentional homicide in the attack. He is being charged as an adult.
