“We went there to protect a monument,” he said.
A man who identified as a member of the white terrorist group Ku Klux Klan fired his handgun toward a black man who was protesting the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia last year. The black victim survived the racist attack. On Tuesday, the klansman was sentenced to four years in prison.
From Joshua Eaton at ThinkProgress:
Judge Richard Moore sentenced Richard Preston Jr., of Baltimore, Maryland to eight years in prison, with four of those suspended, and three years of supervised release on one count of shooting a firearm within 1,000 feet of a school, according to CNN. Moore pleaded no contest in May.
“We didn’t go as the Klan,” Preston told WANE news, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, two days after the rally. “We didn’t go there to create havoc and fight. We went there to protect a monument.”
[via @jjmacnab]
[PHOTO: UNICORN RIOT. KLAN LEADER RICHARD PRESTON, LEFT, AT THE WHITE SUPREMACIST UNITE THE RIGHT RALLY IN CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA, ON AUG. 12, 2017. ]