Charlottesville Beating Suspect Is Arrested in Georgia
By FRANCES ROBLESAUG. 29, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/us/charlottesville-suspect-arrested.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=10&pgtype=sectionfront
One of the suspects in the beating of a young African-American man during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., was arrested in Georgia on Monday.
Alex Michael Ramos, 33, was charged with malicious wounding in the Aug. 12 attack on DeAndre Harris, 20, a teacher’s aide and aspiring rapper, who was beaten by a group of people with wooden boards and pipes.
Mr. Ramos was being held Tuesday in Forsyth, Ga., about an hour south of Atlanta.
The attack was captured on video, and the images were shared widely on social media and used to highlight the mayhem that broke out at the white-power rally when the police did not step in to keep order. The video images helped the authorities identify at least two of the suspected assailants, Mr. Ramos and another man, Daniel P. Borden, who was arrested in Ohio on Friday. At least four more of the assailants have yet to be identified.
The case has become a focal point of debate on social media. Right-wing activists blame Mr. Harris for his injuries and have posted his home address and telephone number online. Mr. Harris, who sustained a broken wrist and a head wound that required 10 staples, cannot return to work because seeing large groups of people make him anxious, his lawyer, S. Lee Merritt, said.
“For someone who is a schoolteacher and performer, all he does is stand around people,” Mr. Merritt said. “That’s sort of a big deal.”
Mr. Harris was assaulted just a few moments after he had intervened in a scuffle that broke out after a friend, Corey Long, had tried to yank away a Confederate flag from a marcher. (Mr. Long also figured in another incident that day that was caught on video: as he was wielding an improvised torch, a Ku Klux Klan leader fired a gun at the ground near his feet.)
Critics argue that video images of the rally show that Mr. Harris and Mr. Long were there to make trouble. But Mr. Merritt, the lawyer, said that although the two men had been “actively heckling white supremacists,” Mr. Harris was not armed with anything but a flashlight and was retreating from the tussle over the flag when he was attacked.
“He’s trying to get away,” Mr. Merritt said. “They are surrounding him and beating him over the head with blunt objects. Their only defense is going to be self-defense, but under no one’s legal standard is it self-defense to chase after someone wielding a flashlight when one of his friends is being speared with a pole, and then beating him maliciously.”
Mr. Merritt said he was disappointed that Mr. Ramos and Mr. Borden had each been charged with only a single count of malicious wounding.
Typically in criminal cases, prosecutors seek a stronger plea-bargaining position by lodging more severe charges than they expect to actually try. The single charge in this case — a felony punishable by one to five years in prison — will make it easier for Mr. Ramos to obtain release on bail, Mr. Merritt said.
“This indicates that law enforcement is not taking this seriously,” he said. “Conspicuously missing are any hate-crime charges. Participating in a hate group’s hate rally using racial slurs, where people in uniform with white-group insignia target one of the few black male protesters and bludgeon him, have all the elements of hate crimes.”
The Charlottesville city prosecutor’s office did not return a call seeking comment about the charges, and the police declined to comment further on the case Tuesday.
Even Mr. Ramos has blamed the authorities for what happened. Shortly after the incident, he went on a profanity-laced rant on Facebook Live, in which he stressed that he was Puerto Rican and said he was not racist. But he faulted the police for clearing out the park where the rally was to be held and pushing the white supremacists onto city streets, which were filled with counterprotesters like Mr. Harris and his friends.
The Unite the Right Rally ended even before it was scheduled to begin, when city officials who were alarmed by repeated violent incidents declared the rally an unlawful assembly. About two hours later, one white supremacist rammed his Dodge into cars and anti-racism demonstrators, killing a 32-year-old woman, Heather D. Heyer.
“I don’t care who they were pushing out of the park, white supremacists or any one of us or Black Lives Matter or Antifa,” Mr. Ramos said. “They were pushing them into opposition protesters, so they can be harmed. That’s what happened. They were supposed to be there to protect and prevent any bad things.”
In the video, Mr. Ramos said he was born and raised in the Bronx. He was known in South Florida as a member of the Occupy movement who participated in the 100-day encampment at a government plaza in Miami in 2011.
But Mr. Ramos was also a member of Anonymous, the hacking collective, and a few fringe right-wing nationalist groups, such as Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, according to Kevin K. Young, who said he and Mr. Ramos were friends during the Occupy movement.
“He just wanted to be part of it,” Mr. Young said. “He wasn’t somebody who presented ideas or planned actions, but he wanted to be there when the action happened.”
Correction: August 29, 2017
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed a statement about the investigation into the assault. It was DeAndre Harris’s lawyer, S. Lee Merritt, not Mr. Harris himself, who expressed disappointment that the authorities had not identified or arrested more suspects in the case.
