Jeremiah just wanted to find his car and go home, but he was trapped.
A massive line of police in riot gear had just forced him and hundreds of other protesters out of Kenosha's Civic Center Park and into the street. After that, there was nowhere to go. Soldiers and cops blocked one end of the road. White guys with big guns blocked the other.
It was past 11 p.m. Tuesday, the third night of protests after a Kenosha police officer shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back. Jeremiah had received a text from a friend saying a bunch of protesters had their tires slashed. He wanted to get to his car before vandals did. He decided the quickest path was to cut through a parking lot.
As he made his way toward it, Jeremiah saw more armed white men. Two crouched on the roof of a building, sniper style. Two or three others stood guard over the lot. One of them, a babyface with a backward ball cap, raised an assault rifle and pointed it at him.
Jeremiah, 24 and Black, was more annoyed than afraid. He'd been out protesting all summer, more than 90 days so far. He knew about these guys and their scare tactics, and he refused to be intimidated.
When the kid started yelling, Jeremiah shouted back: "I'm trying to get out of here. If you're gonna shoot me, just shoot!"
A few minutes later, Jeremiah saw the same guy pointing his weapon at someone else.
This time, Kyle Rittenhouse fired.
Rittenhouse, 17, has been charged with five felonies and a misdemeanor after shooting three people Tuesday night, two of them fatally. His lead attorney, John M. Pierce of the law firm Pierce Bainbridge, has said he plans to argue self-defense...
Marimackenzie was serving as a volunteer street medic that night, providing first aid to injured protesters. Of Native American and Japanese descent, she'd decided to take on the role because she hated the thought of people being hurt while they were protesting violence.
Earlier in the evening, she'd treated a woman hit in the eye with a ricocheted rubber bullet and helped others wash away the tear gas that blurred their vision.
Fellow street medic Gaige Grosskreutz was helping people deal with tear gas, too. Marimackenzie, who had spent several evenings working with him throughout the summer of protests in Milwaukee, stopped to say hello. A 22-year-old with only 20 hours of street medic training to go with her CPR certification, she looked up to Grosskreutz, a licensed paramedic.
Another guy in the vicinity, one Marimackenzie didn't recognize, was telling people he was a medic, too. But he made her uneasy. He had an AR-15 slung across his chest; no medic she'd ever worked with carried a weapon like that.
Some medics arm themselves with handguns as a last resort for protection, but their priority was helping people. Usually, they were paired with security teams.
Marimackenzie's medic partner gestured to the young man.
"Avoid that guy. He looks like bad news."
She would later learn the man who'd drawn her partner's warning was Rittenhouse.
The two walked on. About 10 minutes later, Marimackenzie heard two men yelling at each other. She couldn't tell what they were saying. Shots rang out. A man fell to the ground 50 yards from her.
Before she could reach the man, later identified as Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, a group of bystanders had picked him up and loaded him into a hospital SUV standing by for injured people at the edge of the Froedtert South medical center's parking lot.
"Back up!" Marimackenzie yelled at the crowds trying to livestream the scene. "Give the patient his privacy!"
She looked into the man's eyes. They were open and motionless.
As the SUV carrying Rosenbaum sped across the parking lot to the hospital's back door, Marimackenzie's medic partner told her the shooter was still in the area. The two medics crouched behind a brick hospital sign, hoping it would be enough to protect them if he opened fire again.
Her fellow medic didn't tell her until later that he'd seen the gunman run past them, fewer than 10 yards away.
