What’s the background?
Kenosha police officer Rusten Sheskey shot Jacob Blake Jr. in August 2020. The shooting was deemed to be justified since Blake was armed with a knife, was wanted on a sexual assault warrant, resisted arrest, and reportedly attempted to flee in a car containing someone else’s kids. Sheskey was cleared to return to duty. The Department of Justice did not pursue further charges.
In the aftermath of the justified shooting, riots broke out in Kenosha, culminating in then-17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse’s shooting of three rioters on Aug. 25, two of whom died of their injuries.
Anthony Huber, 26, one of the deceased, was part of the mob that descended upon Rittenhouse.
Huber attacked Rittenhouse with a skateboard and did his best to disarm him, but his best wasn’t good enough. Rittenhouse, keen not to surrender his fate to the whim of the mob, fought to maintain control over his rifle. In the melee, Huber managed to catch a bullet in the chest.
Rittenhouse was later acquitted of charges pertaining to Huber’s shooting.
Possible return to court
Although a jury of his peers determined Rittenhouse was in the right, two months prior to his acquittal, Rittenhouse was named in a civil lawsuit filed in the U.S. Eastern District of Wisconsin in Milwaukee by Huber’s father, John Huber, reported Fox 26.
Huber’s lawsuit accuses police officers of allowing for a dangerous situation that violated his son’s constitutional rights and resulted in his death, reported the Associated Press. Huber’s lawsuit also claims that Rittenhouse conspired with law enforcement to bring harm to the rioters.
The suit suggests that law enforcement “deputized these armed individuals, conspired with them and ratified their actions by letting them patrol the streets armed with deadly weapons to met out justice as they saw fit.”
John Huber said in a statement that the police “walked away from their duties and turned over the streets of Kenosha to Kyle Rittenhouse and other armed vigilantes. If they had done their job, my son would still be alive today.”
Huber is seeking an unspecified sum from city officials, police officers, and Rittenhouse.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman denied motions filed by Rittenhouse and the government defendants seeking to dismiss the suit.
Adelman indicated that Huber’s death “could plausibly be regarded as having been proximately caused by the actions of the governmental defendants.”
The judge’s allowance does not equate to an opinion of any kind on the merits of the case, suggested Rittenhouse attorney Shane Martin. Rather, it simply means the suit can proceed to the next phase.
“While we respect the judge’s decision, we do not believe there is any evidence of a conspiracy and we are confident, just as a Kenosha jury found, Kyle’s actions that evening were not wrongful and were undertaken in self-defense,” said Martin.
Anand Swaminathan, one of the attorneys representing the parents of Rittenhouse’s dead attacker, said that the judge’s decision gets the Huber family “one step closer to justice for their son’s needless death.”
Real family man
According to Snopes, Huber threatened his brother and grandmother with a knife, strangled and suffocated his brother, and then forced them to follow his orders.
The Washington Post reported that Huber, holding a six-inch butcher knife, had threatened to “‘gut’ his brother ‘like a pig.'”
During the Rittenhouse trial, Corey Chirafisi, then a lawyer for the defendant, claimed that Huber had also said, “I’m going to burn the house down with all you f***ers in it.”
He was charged with felonies, convicted, and then served a stint in jail in 2012.
Huber went back to prison in 2017 after violating the terms of his probation.
The violence-prone skateboarder with a history of heroin use came home from prison in 2018, but this time raged against a woman: his own sister.
Fox News Digital reported that he was convicted of domestic abuse and disorderly conduct.
It would appear that the next notable time he took out his rage on someone else proved to be his last.
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