City officials in Kenosha, Wisconsin, are preparing to make a decision in the next couple of weeks on whether to charge the police officer who shot Jacob Blake last year.
Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Gravely is expected to make his decision within the first two weeks of January, according to an agenda for a Monday night Common Council meeting, which also proposes a resolution by Mayor John Antaramian to declare a state of emergency for potential civil unrest following the decision.
Blake, a 29-year-old black man, was shot at least seven times in the back by officer Rusten Sheskey, a seven-year veteran who was responding to a call about a domestic disturbance in August. Blake was left paralyzed from the waist down after the shooting. Sheskey and several other officers were placed on administrative leave.
Part of the incident was caught on video, and it quickly went viral. Blake can be seen in the video walking in front of his car toward the driver’s side, where he opened the driver’s door as an officer is holding on to the back of his shirt. Blake later attempted to move into the car, and the officer began to fire his gun.
State officials later said that Blake had admitted to being in possession of a knife and first tried to taser Blake to stop him from entering his vehicle.
“Law enforcement deployed a taser to attempt to stop Mr. Blake, however the Taser was not successful in stopping Mr. Blake. Mr. Blake walked around his vehicle, opened the driver’s side door, and leaned forward. While holding onto Mr. Blake’s shirt, Officer Rusten Sheskey fired his service weapon 7 times. Officer Sheskey fired the weapon into Mr. Blake’s back,” officials said.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, one of Blake’s lawyers, said bullets had hit Blake’s spinal cord, making it almost impossible for him to learn to walk again.
“His family believes in miracles, but the medical diagnosis right now is that he is paralyzed, and because those bullets severed his spinal cord and shattered some of his vertebrae, it is going to take a miracle for Jacob Blake Jr. to ever walk again,” Crump said.
In October, Blake was moved from a Wisconsin hospital to a spinal cord injury rehabilitation center in Chicago. However, his lawyers did not provide an update on his condition upon the transfer.
During a press conference on Monday, Blake’s family and Kenosha community leaders called for charges to be brought against Sheskey.
“Officer Sheskey fired seven shots into an unarmed man’s back, on a block where our children walk to school and our families go to church,” said Tanya McLean, the executive director of Leaders of Kenosha. “All of us, black, white, brown, native, and newcomer, deserve to be safe in our own neighborhoods, and that means holding police officers accountable when they brutalize us.”
Protests and riots exploded across Kenosha and damaged and burned several businesses, mirroring unrest over the summer following the death of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Memorial Day.
More than 250 people were arrested who were involved in the large protests in Kenosha over the summer, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Some businesses have already begun preparing for more unrest this month in response to the charging decision by boarding up windows and doors.
“We just wanted to make sure that we’d be ready if anything happened,” local business owner Brian Unrath told TMJ4. “We had all of our boards in the basement, and from rumors that we heard, we just wanted to put them back just as a precaution.”
