KKK member who drove into BLM protesters sentenced to 3 years
'They started scattering like [expletive] cockroaches.... It’s kind of funny if you ask me.'
A leader in the Ku Klux Klan white supremacist group will now be serving three years in prison after boasting on social media about driving his pickup truck through a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters in Virginia.
According to reports, last June, Harry Rogers intentionally plowed his vehicle into a group of protesters in Henrico County, Virginia, while his girlfriend’s 14-year-old son was seated in the passenger seat.
“This Chevrolet 2500 went up on the curb and through the protest,” he bragged in the Facebook video that played in court during his trial.
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“They started scattering like [expletive] cockroaches…. It’s kind of funny if you ask me.”
Rogers’ vehicle hit two people but fortunately, no one was seriously injured in the attack. At his trial last August, he was also convicted of assaulting a third victim based on video footage of that person being struck by Rogers’ pickup.
Shannon L. Taylor, the Henrico County commonwealth’s attorney, confirmed that Rogers admitted he was a “leader of the Ku Klux Klan and a propagandist for Confederate ideology.” But his lawyer, George Townsend, argued in court that his client was “born into” the organization.
Tuesday, the 37-year-old was sentenced to three years and eight months in jail and conceded at his sentencing that he “didn’t make the right decisions that day.”
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Despite having a minor present, Rogers did not face charges specifically related to endangering the teenager and only plead guilty to three counts of assault and battery, one count of destruction of property less than $1,000, and one count of failing to stop after a crash.
As a result, he will be serving consecutive terms of one year in prison on each assault and battery charge in addition to consecutive terms of four months on each of the other charges.
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