Jacob Blake feared becoming “the next George Floyd” when a Wisconsin police officer shot him in the back seven times in the city of Kenosha, he said in a national TV interview.
Blake’s comments came as prosecutors asked a judge to order a white teen charged with killing two men at the resulting protests over Blake’s shooting to stay away from bars and white supremacist groups.
“I resisted getting beat on, and what I mean by that is not falling, not letting them put their head on my neck, that’s all I was thinking, honestly,” Blake told Good Morning America’s Michael Straham.
Blake was left paralyzed from the waist down due to the gunshot wounds. “I was counting down my breaths and my blinks. I was like ‘God, I’m coming. I guess that’s it for me,’” he added.
Three of Blake’s children were in the car where he was shot, witnessing the incident.
“My babies are right here, my babies,” Blake recalled thinking. “After he stopped shooting me, I said, ‘Daddy loves you no matter what.’ I thought it was going to be the last thing I say to them. Thank God it wasn’t.”
“I didn’t want to be the next George Floyd,” he said. “I didn’t want to die.”
Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was killed by Minneapolis police three months prior when he suffocated under an officer’s knee. His shocking death helped trigger a summer of anti-police brutality protests that prompted a national reckoning with racism in America and overseas.
Blake’s interview came on the heels of a prosecutor’s announcement last week that he would not bring criminal charges against the officer who shot him. Michael Gravely, Kenosha county district attorney, claimed at a press conference that his office found that the officer, Rusten Sheskey, would not face charges because of the state’s law relating to self-defense.
Police had an arrest warrant for Blake’s arrest on suspicion of sexual assault, as well as counts of trespassing and disorderly conduct, at the time of the altercation. Prosecutors later dropped the charges against Blake.
Sheskey shot Blake on 23 August when officers were responding to a domestic incident report. Blake was at the home of the mother of three of his children. They were there to celebrate their son’s eighth birthday.
An argument erupted between the woman and her neighbor. Blake said he left with the three children because of the argument.
The mother of his children then called the police, saying that Blake had the keys to her rental car. Blake told Strahan that when he walked outside and saw officers, he didn’t think it related to him. “I hadn’t done anything, so I didn’t feel like they were there for me,” he said.
Sheskey told investigators that he feared that Blake was going to stab him, so he opened fire. Blake family attorney Ben Crump, however, has questioned whether Blake threatened Sheskey with a knife, saying “nowhere does the video footage show a knife extended and aimed to establish the requisite intent”.
A bystander posted video of the shooting online, spurring weeks of protests against police brutality. Authorities arrested more than 250 people during protests in the following days.
Among them was Kyle Rittenhouse, an 18-year-old white agitator who traveled from his Illinois home to Kenosha – and shot at Black Lives Matter protesters. Rittenhouse now faces charges in the shooting deaths of two men and wounding a third. He pleaded not guilty last week.
Prosecutors revealed Wednesday that Rittenhouse went to a Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin bar shortly after pleading not guilty – wearing a shirt that read “Free as F---” and drinking three beers.
At the bar, Rittenhouse made a “white power” hand gesture and posed for photos with several members of the Proud Boys, an extreme far-right group “with ties to white nationalism”, according to the Washington Post.
Several Proud Boys have been arrested in relation to the attack on the Capitol last week, according to reports.
