Beyond Charlottesville by Terry McAuliffe

Author:Terry McAuliffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER 7

Saturday Morning, August 12

We’d made all the preparations we could at the state level, and had full mobilization of our State Police and National Guard, but I remained apprehensive about what the day would bring. Brian Moran started calling and texting me with updates at 6:30 that morning. He and his deputy, Curtis Brown, attended a 7 a.m. briefing for law enforcement and first responders at the John Paul Jones Arena, where Department of Corrections buses were lined up to take our troopers to downtown Charlottesville.

“I let them know we had the potential for violence, that while precious few of us were from there or ever lived there, that Charlottesville was our city that day,” Colonel Flaherty said later.

Brian called the Charlottesville mayor at 7:15 a.m. to check in with him. We wanted to make sure the mayor was well aware that we were mobilized in force and ready to do anything we could in support. Next, Brian and Curtis, along with Colonel Flaherty, drove over to a downtown garage. As they were pulling off the ramp onto the third level, they saw a group of heavily armed men in fatigues exiting their vehicles.

“They ain’t ours?” Brian said to Curtis.

They both shook their heads and braced for the rest of the day. Brian was in place at the corner of Emancipation Park at 8:35 a.m. when he watched the first alt-right types arrive and assemble, some in helmets, carrying shields and flagpoles. Jason Kessler’s permit called for a rally between noon and 5 p.m., and the marchers were already massing this early in the morning.

Brian stood within a few feet to listen in on their chants and conversation to glean any information he could on how they were organizing. He tried to identify as many different militia insignia as he could. All around him the crowd of young white males grew. Soon they were lining both sides of the street.

Gay Lee Einstein, a pastor at nearby Scottsdale Presbyterian Church who lived in Charlottesville, was part of a gathering of hundreds of clergy heading toward the rally that morning. She told me she’d found a plastic baggie full of rocks and a white piece of paper warning of “Shocking crime facts” and signed by the Ku Klux Klan, closing, “Wake up, white America!” She stayed with the group as long as she could. “I started crying during the thing,” she told me.

Eileen, a registered nurse who was volunteering that day to help out as she could, was with the group of clergy near Emancipation Park that morning. “I was in the middle of all of it,” she told me later. “We watched the crowd grow. I saw a lot of aggressive sexism toward young women. I saw a lot of woman being called the C-word and being mistreated. One woman was a little on the chubby side and these men were saying things like, ‘You’re a little fat, but we’d still do you.’ I was so perplexed by it all, I went back and studied it.

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