On Thursday, a video of a black protester being sucker-punched at a Trump rally began to circulate on social media.
According to the Associated Press, the man, John McGraw, has been charged with assault and disorderly conduct.
McGraw told Inside Edition shortly after the incident that Jones “deserved it.” He also took it one step further:
The next time we see him, we might have to kill him. We don’t know who he is. He might be with a terrorist organization.
In the video, an African-American man is being escorted out of the rally to a chorus of boos from the gathered rally-goers in North Carolina. The man, Rakeem Jones, was being led out by authorities when he is suddenly punched in the face out of nowhere a white man in a cowboy hat.
Jones stumbles up the steps and is taken down and handcuffed by officers.
Help me identify the racist Trump supporter who repeatedly punched this protestor in the face last night.
CRIMINAL!https://t.co/lNrUME2jCo
— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) March 10, 2016
Jones told the Washington Post said that he and a group of three others had attended the rally as a social experiment. The group included a white woman, a Muslim man, and a gay man. He insisted that “no one in our group attempted to get physical” and that the most that had happened was that the woman in the group began shouting at the rally.
When Jones woke up the next morning, he was surprised to see himself on video on social media.
“Boom, he caught me,” Jones told the Washington Post in a telephone interview. “After I get it, before I could even gain my thoughts, I’m on the ground getting escorted out. Now I’m waking up this morning looking at the news and seeing me getting hit again.”