The now-infamous “United the Right” rally brought together neo-Nazis and white supremacists for a tiki-torch march across the University of Virginia campus on Friday night, August 11, 2017 (photo, right).
The rally culminated in the car-attack murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer by a far-right terrorist the following day.
Heyer’s killer, a neo-Nazi named James Fields, was sentenced to life in prison, and four other individuals got prison terms for assaulting another counter-protester named DeAndre Harris (details here).
But the D.A. at the time, Robert Tracci (photo, left; profile here), a Republican, declined to charge any of the torch-bearing marchers under Virginia’s intimidation law.
That became a campaign issue when Tracci ran for re-election in 2019, and he lost to Jim Hingeley (photo, below left; profile here), a Democrat.
Now Hingeley has done what Republican Tracci wouldn’t do: He obtained grand jury indictments against three of the UTR marchers under Virginia’s “burning objects” law (enacted to combat Ku Klux Klan cross burnings). None of the three were locals; Dallas Medina traveled from Ohio, William Zachary Smith from Texas, and Tyler Bradley Dykes from South Carolina (see story here).
Medina (photo,right), 31, had a job clearing brush from power lines. His internet postings include “I want all niggers and jews to die,” and “I would love nothing more than to see this pathetic military of ours, full of niggers and spics and self-hating race-traitor whites, slaughtered by the millions.” (See anti-Nazi website here.)
The only info I found on Smith, besides a photo (left), is that he was a bodyguard for a neo-Nazi organizer of the rally and was arrested in 2018 for spraying teargas. Dykes (photo below), 25, is a Cornell University dropout who owns this local cybersecurity business, according to this website.
These losers are facing up to five years in prison if convicted of the grand jury charges, according to MSN (see story here).
The moral of this story is that it makes a difference who you vote for, and in this case voting out the law-and-order Republican and voting in a Democrat who used to be a public defender is what it took to get these racists indicted.
Charlottesville being a university town, it wouldn’t surprise or bother me if the jurors are liberal professors and students. If that gets them convicted, maybe they’ll conclude a university campus isn’t the best place to peddle hate.