Alleged driver of car that plowed into Charlottesville crowd was a Nazi sympathizer, former teacher says
By T. Rees Shapiro, Ellie Silverman, Laura Vozzella and John Woodrow Cox August 13 at 1:00 PM
CHARLOTTESVILLE — A man accused of plowing a car into a crowd of protesters here — killing one person and leaving 19 injured — has long sympathized with Nazi views and had stood with a group of white supremacists hours before Saturday’s bloody crash.
The accused driver, James Alex Fields Jr., 20, of Ohio, had espoused extremist ideals at least since high school, according to Derek Weimer, a history teacher.
Weimer said that he taught Fields during his junior and senior years at Randall K. Cooper High School in Kentucky. During a class called “America’s Modern Wars,” Weimer said that Fields wrote a deeply researched paper about the Nazi military during World War II.
“It was obvious that he had this fascination with Nazism and a big idolatry of Adolf Hitler,” Weimer said. “He had white supremacist views. He really believed in that stuff.”
Weimer said that Fields’s research project into the Nazi military was well written but appeared to be a “big lovefest for the German military and the Waffen SS.”
Weimer said that as a teacher he unsuccessfully attempted to steer Fields away from his Nazi infatuation by using historical examples and facts.
“When you’re a teacher and you see one of your former students do this, it’s a nightmare scenario,” Weimer said. “This was something that was growing in him. I admit I failed. I tried my best. But this is definitely a teachable moment and something we need to be vigilant about because this stuff is tearing up our country.”
Video recorded at the scene of the crash shows the 2010 Dodge Challenger accelerating into crowds on a pedestrian mall, sending bodies flying — and then reversing at high speed, hitting yet more people. Witnesses said the street was filled with people opposed to the white nationalists, who had come to town bearing Confederate flags and anti-Semitic epithets.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/one-dead-as-car-strikes-crowds-amid-protests-of-white-nationalist-gathering-in-charlottesville-two-police-die-in-helicopter-crash/2017/08/13/3590b3ce-8021-11e7-902a-2a9f2d808496_story.html?pushid=599095ffa1ccab1d00000021&tid=notifi_push_breaking-news&utm_term=.c2fc7c5b1899
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