KENOSHA, Wis. (CN) — A jury acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse of all charges including first-degree murder on Friday, finding the 18-year-old’s actions on the night last year when he killed two and injured a third with an AR-15 during a chaotic Kenosha, Wisconsin, protest did not amount to homicide, attempted homicide or reckless endangerment.
After 11 days of witness testimony and lawyers’ arguments and more than 24 hours of deliberation, the unanimous jury delivered not guilty verdicts on all five felony charges against Rittenhouse, which were subsequently dismissed with prejudice.
The jury—comprised of seven women and five men, including one person of color—left the courthouse shortly after the verdict without comment.
Prosecutors charged Rittenhouse with first-degree reckless homicide for killing Joseph Rosenbaum, 36; first-degree intentional homicide for killing Anthony Huber, 26; and first-degree attempted intentional homicide for injuring Gaige Grosskreutz, 28. They also charged him with two counts of reckless endangerment for firing two shots at an unknown man who kicked him while he was on the ground and for pointing his gun in the direction of Richie McGinniss, a videographer for the Daily Caller in the line of fire when Rosenbaum was shot.
The teenager dropped to his knees in tears when the verdict was read and was consoled by one of his attorneys as his mother and sister cried in the gallery. He was quickly whisked out of the courtroom and out of sight as the court adjourned.
Kenosha County Circuit Court Judge Bruce Schroeder—who drew scrutiny for some of his actions during the trial—last week dismissed Rittenhouse’s citation for violating an emergency curfew on the night of the shootings. He followed that up on Monday by tossing the gun charge Rittenhouse faced for being underage while publicly carrying the AR-15 he used in the shootings, agreeing with the defense that a confusingly worded Wisconsin gun law allowed Rittenhouse, then 17, to possess the AR-15 in public because it is not a short-barreled rifle or shotgun.
The prosecutors on the case – Assistant Kenosha County District Attorneys Thomas Binger and James Kraus – asked late for lesser-included offenses like second-degree homicide to be added to the jury instructions. They were ultimately unnecessary.
Neither prosecutor made themselves available to the press at the courthouse after the verdict. A message left for Binger at the district attorney’s office was not immediately answered.
In a press conference from his Racine office after the verdict, the defendant’s attorney Mark Richards expressed disappointment that Rittenhouse became a cause célèbre for his initial legal representatives, saying, “I don’t represent causes, I represent clients, and the only thing that ended up mattering to me was whether he was found not guilty or not.”
Richards, who said he received multiple death threats while representing Rittenhouse, remarked that he was relieved by the jury’s findings and hoped his client can regain some semblance of anonymity and “get on with his life.”
Rittenhouse was in Kenosha on the morning of Aug. 25, 2020, with his friend Dominick Black after the two spent the night at Black’s Kenosha home. He lived at the time with his mom and two sisters in nearby Antioch, Illinois, and worked as a lifeguard at a rec center in the Kenosha area.
That morning, the two cleaned graffiti from the onset of several days of protests that erupted in the small southeastern Wisconsin city after Jacob Blake, a then-29-year-old Black man, was shot seven times by a white Kenosha police officer responding to a domestic disturbance.
The initial days of unrest in Kenosha in August of 2020 turned violent and volatile at night, resulting in riotous clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement and the damage and arson of dozens of cars and businesses.
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