“I’m going to the police,” Rittenhouse answered over his shoulder, still fleeing.
“Who’s shot? Who’s shot?” Grosskreutz yelled. Rittenhouse didn’t answer. Then Grosskreutz yelled, “Hey, stop him!” Grosskreutz pursued Rittenhouse, withdrawing the pistol tucked in the waistband of his shorts.
Rittenhouse tripped. When Anthony Huber, a 26-year-old father figure to his girlfriend’s two children, smacked him with his skateboard, Rittenhouse sent a bullet through Huber’s “heart, aorta, pulmonary artery, and right lung,” according to police reports, killing him.
Then Grosskreutz towered over the fallen Rittenhouse, a pistol in his right hand. That’s when Rittenhouse blew off Grosskreutz’s right biceps, his bullet exploding a tattoo of caduceus, the winged staff entwined with snakes that is the symbol of Western medicine.
Rittenhouse stood. The boy who had so often been bullied watched everyone flee him. Balch and Smith were running down the street toward him, but at this point there was no way to save him from what he had done. As gunfire from elsewhere hammered the night, and sirens wailed, Rittenhouse jogged towards the BearCats. A bystander yelled, “Dude right here shot all of them down there,” and then kept trying to inform the police.
Approaching the BearCats, Rittenhouse raised his hands. But he didn’t keep them up and handled his weapon multiple times; cops have shot people for much less. But the police ignored the white kid and rumbled their BearCats toward the crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters. Rittenhouse tried to turn himself in at a patrol car but was brushed away. And so, the unrest that began with a Kenosha police officer shooting a Black man seven times in the back ended with the department letting an armed white youth who had just killed two people and grievously wounded another walk free. Kenosha’s sheriff would later blame all this on “tunnel vision” created by the chaos.
After law enforcement had locked down the scene, Balch, Dennis, and others, gathered at the southernmost Car Source lot, trying to puzzle-fit together cellphone footage to figure out what happened, while behind them a car burned. Both sides assured the other that they understood their pain, that they were only trying to help, that nobody meant for this to happen. But what exactly had happened was impossible to sort out, and so eventually the white militiaman and the Black activist shook hands in that what-more-can-be-said way of American males, and then they retreated to their respective fragments of the United States.
9. The Next Battles
At the auto-body shop, Rittenhouse told Black what he’d done.
They drove to the apartment of Rittenhouse’s mother, in Illinois. According to police documents, Wendy Lewis suggested to her son that he flee. Rittenhouse insisted on turning himself in at a nearby police station.
There, for the rest of the night, he cycled through fits of crying, throwing up, and then calming down again. When he and Lewis were left alone in an interrogation room, a CCTV camera recorded them weeping and hugging. “I’m gonna need therapy,” he said to her. He told a police officer, “I know this fucked me up.… I’m not a child anymore.” The police, whose ranks he had wanted to join his whole life, were now his jailers, and he begged them to delete his social media accounts, as they had possession of his phone.
AUGUST 26, 2020 APPROX. 1:30 A.M.
Rittenhouse is booked by police in Antioch, Illinois.
Eventually, Rittenhouse would be charged with first-degree reckless homicide for slaying Rosenbaum, first-degree intentional homicide for killing Huber, and attempted intentional homicide for shooting Grosskreutz, as well as two counts of recklessly endangering the safety of others and use of a dangerous weapon for almost hitting bystanders, including McGinniss, and one count of possessing a dangerous weapon while underage.