Kyle Rittenhouse was sprinting away from the scene of an apparent crime when he phoned a friend and choked out, “I just killed somebody. I had to shoot him.” Then he hung up. Men in masks were beginning to chase him. Rittenhouse kept running, his heavy cowboy boots clomping against the pavement, uncertain if he’d have to fire his gun again. He was 17, and for much of his life he’d toyed around with guns and dreamed of being a cop—of keeping order. That was what he’d been seeking to do last August when he carried an assault rifle into downtown Kenosha, Wisconsin, swaths of which had been razed during previous nights of rioting. That was what he’d been doing moments earlier, as midnight neared, when he’d confronted a group of vandals and arsonists wrecking a car dealership. He had been trying to get them to stop. One, with a red T-shirt wrapped around his head so that his eyes showed through a slit, had charged the teenager, and Rittenhouse had fled.
“Fuck you!” the man had yelled. Rittenhouse turned to face his pursuer. The man lunged, and Rittenhouse fired at point-blank range. Then he stood over the twitching body, his first aid bag dangling unused at his side. Even before bystanders began futilely trying to plug the dying man’s wounds with a T-shirt, Rittenhouse took off up Kenosha’s main drag.
Three blocks to the north, he could see a line of four armored police personnel carriers: safety, it seemed to him. Rittenhouse huffed along for a block and a half until he encountered a group of racial-justice protesters streaming south, drawn by his gunshots. At first, the throng didn’t pay much attention to the kid weaving through them: With his baby face and his backward American-flag baseball cap, he looked even younger than he was. But soon shouts relayed news of the shooting through the crowd. The barrel of the Smith & Wesson AR-15-style assault rifle he gripped was still hot.
“Get that dude!”
“What’d he do?”
“He shot someone!”
“Get his ass!”
By the time Rittenhouse was within a block of reaching the police, roughly a dozen men were chasing him. One threw a right haymaker, knocking off the teenager’s baseball cap, before peeling away, perhaps intimidated by the rifle. Rittenhouse was a few steps ahead of the pack when he tripped. He slammed down on the asphalt and rolled onto his back, whipping his weapon toward his pursuers.
A tall Black man tried unsuccessfully to drop-kick him, then dashed onward. Rittenhouse seems to have fired twice as the man hurdled over him—and somehow missed, despite their proximity.
Then a white man in a dark sweatshirt, hood up, smashed Rittenhouse with a skateboard gripped in one hand as he tried to grab the rifle with the other. That time, Rittenhouse couldn’t miss—the muzzle of his gun was practically jabbed into the man’s belly. After the blast, the skateboarder staggered a few steps, clutching his chest, trying to keep his life from pouring out.
Now a tall white man loomed over Rittenhouse. His baseball cap read “PARAMEDIC.” In his right hand, he held a pistol. But Rittenhouse, with the bigger weapon, had the drop on him. The man backed up, hands in the air, the pistol’s muzzle pointing skyward. Abruptly the man stepped forward. Rittenhouse squeezed the trigger. The biceps of the arm holding the pistol exploded into gore. The handgun clattered to the street.
A fourth man was backing away, hands raised. Others were ducking behind trees and cars. The hooded skateboarder lay facedown in the street. The man whose arm had been blown open was kneeling nearby, shrieking for help.
As Rittenhouse stood, the lights of the police vehicles illuminated his face—red, white, and blue—and he hustled toward them. He had some minor cuts and scrapes, but he was essentially unhurt. He approached the hulking personnel carriers with his surgical-gloved hands held high and his rifle dangling from a military-style body sling. He wasn’t sure how many people he might have just killed. Certainly, one. Probably, more.
Though portions of the shootings had been captured on at least eight video recordings, Americans who dissected the footage in the coming days wouldn’t agree on what they saw—and the question of what had truly happened that night would become a point of bitter debate in a divided country. Many conservatives would lionize Rittenhouse as a hero, defending property and then himself against a mob. Many on the left would vilify him as a murderous white supremacist. The truth, however, was even more tragic than either side allowed.
This story draws on dozens of hours of video footage, including a comprehensive timeline of crucial events created by syncing 11 livestreams; countless photos; dozens of interviews, including some with participants speaking for the first time; previous reportage; and extensive police and court records. It is the most complete investigation and reconstruction yet of how American order imploded for three nights in Kenosha, until citizens were warring in the streets, and what that breakdown might tell us about the United States’ deepening divisions.
Two days before Kyle Rittenhouse fired his weapon of war, Kenosha police responded to a call from a woman reporting that the father of her children, Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, was causing a disturbance at her home. When a white officer named Rusten Sheskey arrived, he saw Blake put a child into an SUV; the officer’s lawyer later said that Sheskey believed that the boy was being abducted. A warrant for third-degree felony sexual assault was out for Blake, stemming from allegations made by the same woman earlier that summer, and so Sheskey tried to arrest him. Within minutes, Blake, Sheskey, and two other officers were wrestling on the lawn as a crowd gathered. Videos captured Blake struggling free and limping around the front of the SUV. Sheskey followed a step behind, his service pistol aimed between Blake’s shoulder blades. As Blake opened the driver’s-side door, Sheskey grabbed a fistful of his white tank top. The fabric stretched as Blake leaned inside the vehicle, still facing away. Sheskey fired seven times. The vehicle’s horn blared unrelentingly as Blake’s body draped across the steering wheel. In the back seat, Blake’s three young children screamed.
According to the police, Sheskey fired his gun after seeing Blake twist toward him, short-bladed knife in hand. (Blake would later tell investigators that he was putting the knife away when Sheskey shot him.) The aggressive action that Sheskey alleges isn’t discernible on the videos, however, in which Blake is partly obscured by the car door. Indeed, what many people saw was a retreating Black man gunned in the back by a white police officer. “You did not have to shoot him, bro. He was getting in his fucking car,” a bystander who’d been filming the altercation shouted at Sheskey. “I’m posting this shit on Facebook.”
A few minutes later, that video popped onto the Facebook feed of Nick Dennis, a 37-year-old Black Kenoshan who lived nearby. He immediately drove to where Blake had been shot. Soon the normally quiet stretch of low-rent apartment buildings became crowded with locals chanting for justice. By evening, several hundred people, Black, white, and brown, surrounded police officers cordoning the crime scene, and some began challenging the officers to take off their badges, put down their guns, and fight.
Relations between Kenosha’s largely white police force and its minority residents had long been tense. “I think society has to come to a threshold where there's some people that aren't worth saving,” the region’s white sheriff had mused two years earlier, when four Black people accused of shoplifting were arrested following a high-speed car chase. “We need to build warehouses… and lock them away for the rest of their lives.” The sheriff later apologized for the comments, but residents like Dennis resented the police force for what they felt was a long history of abuse, especially officers shooting people in questionable circumstances without facing charges.
For most of Dennis’s life, he’d tried to avoid confronting the police. In his twenties, he’d racked up multiple charges for dealing marijuana. But after finishing 18 months in prison in 2013, he trained as a machinist, got a good job, and focused on his sons. He received only traffic violations from then on, and even if he felt like the stops were petty harassment, he endured them, believing that a tall and muscular Black man like himself was always one misinterpreted gesture away from having his life derailed. He felt powerless to challenge the system. But earlier that summer, the death of George Floyd beneath the knee of a white police officer, and the subsequent nationwide racial-justice protests, catalyzed a profound transformation in him. “I felt myself crying,” Dennis said of watching video of Floyd’s murder. “I hadn’t cried in years. I could only think if it was my sons.” That’s when Dennis began joining Black Lives Matter marches.
Now he’d come to the site of Blake’s shooting, hoping to join a peaceful demonstration. But as the evening dimmed into night, he watched as people pushed past flimsy police tape and men began jumping on the hood and windshield of a police cruiser. After one cop was knocked out by a thrown brick, the rest retreated, and Dennis marched with the crowd through residential neighborhoods toward police headquarters, chanting, “Whose streets? Our streets!” As the protesters neared the police station, they found the roads crammed with cars bearing still more protesters, some waving Black Lives Matter signs. Authorities had parked unmanned municipal garbage trucks sideways in the streets, creating a hasty barricade, but the masses overran them and made their way to the three-story station. Wearing a black face mask decorated with a fist raising its middle finger, Dennis recorded himself on his phone amid throngs of protesters, declaring, “We’re gonna turn this bitch up!”
In front of the police building, several dozen cops in riot gear, most of them white, formed a wall with shields and batons. At first the crowd only insulted them; then someone got to throwing small firecrackers. Soon people began to lob bigger incendiaries, which made explosions that sounded to Dennis like artillery fire, and the police retreated inside. He was furious, too, but wouldn’t participate in violence.
With the police bottled up, there was no one to check the crowd. It rampaged into the neighboring Civic Center, a square of neoclassical governmental edifices arranged around a tree-filled park, built before Kenosha’s once prosperous factories had been decimated by offshoring, and which now seemed grandiose for such a small, hardscrabble city. People busted windows at the courthouse. They tried to set the Register of Deeds building on fire. They tore down a statue of a dinosaur outside a natural history museum. It seems a young white man set the garbage truck barricades on fire with rolled towels soaked in gasoline.
Dennis livestreamed much of what was happening from his cell phone. As he saw it, he was confronting America with the wages of what the police had wrought, in their shooting of Blake. In immersing himself in the next three nights of chaos, he would regard himself as a witness and an activist. When he could, he tried to prevent illegal acts and keep others safe; he warned people away from the burning garbage trucks, afraid they might explode. But he realized that something more powerful than himself had been unleashed.
Videos showed hundreds of people of diverse ethnicities and ages packing the park. Though probably dozens of them engaged in vandalism and arson, most, like Dennis, were simply bearing witness; some were even cheering, seemingly celebrating. It wasn’t just fury at the shooting of a single man that fueled the destruction: It was rage at a country in which African Americans die, on average, four years earlier than white people—having been afforded only a fraction of the wealth and opportunity. It was fury at globalization reducing the city’s factories to weedy lots, and at a generation-long widening of the chasm between the nation’s rich and poor. It was the grief and uncertainty produced by a once-in-a-century pandemic. It was the partisan anger stoked by a historically divisive presidency and a scorched-earth election. It was the passing of collective judgment on America’s broken promises. There was solidarity as the people tore their community apart.
Kyle Rittenhouse’s idolization of the police had started early. As a boy—growing up about a 30-minute drive south of Kenosha, just over the state line, in Illinois—he enrolled in a cadet program, which offered firearms training and the chance to ride along in patrol cars. He posed for pictures in police uniforms and filled his Facebook page with posts that celebrated law enforcement. Rittenhouse and his mother, who was similarly fervent in her support of the police, made frequent use of the so-called thin blue line flag—a black-and-white version of the American flag, with a single blue stripe. Originally employed by some members of law enforcement to represent their concept of themselves as the wall between civilization and anarchy, the “thin blue line” has more recently been adopted by some opponents of the Black Lives Matter movement.
A primary tool of the police trade also fascinated Rittenhouse: guns. When he was nine years old, his mother shared a picture on Facebook of her boy wielding an AR-15-style assault rifle, the mass-market military-inspired weapon Americans have snapped up by the millions—sometimes for as little as a few hundred dollars from big-box retailers. In the photo, he stands in a muddy yard, the weapon comically large in his stubby arms, its magazine well empty. He smiles with cherubic cheekiness while one finger pokes at the trigger.
Rittenhouse’s lawyers declined to provide access to him or to his mother, Wendy Lewis, to respond to my questions. But the long paper trail generated by the Rittenhouse family’s involvement with the legal system portrays a young man buffeted by familial and financial disorder, for whom the power and control represented by policing—and by guns themselves—could have been appealing.
Court records for 2003, the year of Rittenhouse’s birth, show that the wages earned by his father at a chain grocery store were being garnished due to his falling behind on rent. The boy’s family was evicted twice in 2005. In the summer of 2017, his mother, filling out an application for a new apartment, indicated her reason for departing her current address as “Left kids’ dad.” Within months Lewis was evicted again, and soon thereafter she filed for bankruptcy, listing $14,103 in assets—most of that represented by a heavily used Chevy sedan, along with child support she was owed—against $31,434 in debts. After that, the family landed in an inexpensive ground-floor apartment in a complex about which online reviews reveal a litany of complaints, from broken appliances to “black water constantly.”
Rittenhouse appeared to have had a rough time at school. In 2017, Lewis sought a restraining order to protect her 14-year-old son from a 13-year-old middle school classmate. In the petition, she wrote that the boy “calls Kyle dumb and stupid. Say that going to hurt Kyle.” She claimed that the boy also visited the family’s apartment, where he yelled “to my son Kyle calling him names and telling him that he is going to kick his butt.” The following year, Rittenhouse attended some high school but seems to have left without finishing ninth grade; two people told the Chicago Sun-Times that he had dropped out. (His mother would later tell police he was “homeschooled.”) Classmates described Rittenhouse to Vice as easily angered and confrontational. They claimed that he was known for supporting Donald Trump and enjoying “triggering the libs.” The contentiousness seemed to go both ways: A video shared with Vice showed Rittenhouse being pushed to the ground from behind by classmates.
In January 2020, Rittenhouse traveled to a Trump rally and cheered for his presidential hero from the front row. Around that time, he also applied to the Marine Corps, but didn’t qualify. In March the coronavirus caused him to be furloughed from his part-time job as a YMCA lifeguard. As The Washington Post first reported, when he got his $1,200 stimulus check, he decided he wanted an assault rifle. The only problem was that Rittenhouse, at 17, couldn’t legally buy a weapon of that kind.
Rittenhouse had a friend who was old enough, however: Dominick Black, a curly-haired 18-year-old who hoped to join the Air Force and who was dating Rittenhouse’s younger sister. A lawyer for Black didn’t respond to requests for comment, but extensive police documents related to his later arrest, including video of an interview conducted by an investigator, were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. According to those documents, Black, who lived in Kenosha, and Rittenhouse traveled to a rural stretch of northern Wisconsin, where Black’s stepfather owned property, and purchased the Smith & Wesson 223-5.56 rifle from an Ace Hardware in a nearby town. They used Black’s name and Rittenhouse’s money. Black said he recognized he could have refused the illegal transaction, but feared that “[Kyle] would have threw a fit.” The idea was that they would go hunting, but Rittenhouse never took the necessary safety courses to get licensed. Instead, they shot targets.
A video posted to Rittenhouse’s TikTok account showed him firing the rifle in a wooded area while a rap song played. The social media account carried the subtitles “Bruh I’m just tryna be famous,” “Trump 2020,” and “BLUE LIVES MATTER.” A picture of Rittenhouse and Black, which appears to be from the same trip, showed them clutching assault rifles, the image superimposed over a thin blue line flag, as if they were already lawmen.
When they headed home, the two faced a problem: Rittenhouse lacked the paperwork required to store the gun at his family’s apartment. According to police reports, when Black’s stepfather learned what they had done, he locked the gun away in a safe in his garage in Kenosha. He would subsequently allow the boys to take it “up north,” but each time demanded the weapon back once they returned.
As the summer of 2020 passed, Rittenhouse began to careen into scrapes with other teenagers and the law. In July, a cellphone recorded what appeared to be Rittenhouse, Black, and a short dark-haired girl who looks like Rittenhouse’s sister, hanging out near Kenosha’s lakefront when they got into an argument with a tall young woman. A shoving match erupted; Black attempted to pin the young woman’s arms in a bear hug, so she couldn’t defend herself; Rittenhouse seemed to go into such a frenzy punching her that one of his American flag Crocs flew off; then several boys knocked Rittenhouse to the pavement, and he got up and fled.
Then in late August, police clocked Rittenhouse driving at least 20 miles per hour over the speed limit on the freeway. When they stopped him, they found that he lacked a valid driver’s license. Four days later, as Kenosha exploded with unrest, Rittenhouse may have glimpsed an opportunity. Here was an apparent chance for him to be the law, as he’d always dreamed—and his gun was already waiting for him at Black’s stepfather’s house in the burning city.
The day after Blake was shot and the police department was besieged, social media and the national news focused America’s attention on “Kenowhere,” as its residents affectionately call it, and an ever growing number of protesters massed there, many coming from out of town. Demonstrators peacefully marched through the city, blocking traffic. Someone would shout, “Say his name!” Hundreds would roar back, “Jacob Blake!” Major sports celebrities, faith leaders, and politicians called for justice.
That afternoon, the National Guard arrived and police shut down nearby freeway exits, trying to stem the tide of incomers. At sundown, a curfew kicked in and some protesters went home. But hundreds of others confronted riot police, hurling water bottles and firecrackers, until officers responded with tear gas and flash-bang grenades.
As demonstrators left the Civic Center, they began smashing and burning their way through town. They spray-painted the city’s parole office with “convict Rusten Sheskey” and then set it on fire with vindictive good cheer. They looted a Mexican restaurant, a Hispanic grocery, a beauty-products emporium owned by Korean immigrants, and a cell phone store run by a man of Palestinian descent, as well as a gas station and a payday lender, all of which were then burned. (The Kenosha Area Business Alliance would ultimately count about 40 businesses destroyed and at least another 40 damaged.)
When the throng attacked a two-story brick building with commercial space on the ground floor, Nick Dennis yelled at them, “Do not burn that! There’s houses at the top!” But the crowd was beyond all control. Nearby, a 70-year-old-man tried to defend the mattress store where he worked and the historic Danish Brotherhood Lodge 14, where he was a member, by spraying rioters with a fire extinguisher. A young man slammed him in the head with a Gatorade bottle petrified with hardened concrete, breaking the older man’s jaw and leaving him unconscious in the street. “These weren’t people out to represent Black Lives Matter,” Dennis said. “They were out to burn shit.”
In the coming days, authorities in Kenosha would blame outsiders for much of the violence committed in their city, pointing to more than 80 people they had arrested with non-Kenosha addresses, largely for curfew violations. But photos, videos, and arrest records show that those who destroyed Kenosha were locals and outsiders, white and Black. These were Americans, turning first on their government and their city, and then on their fellow citizens.
The next morning, August 25, Kyle Rittenhouse awoke in Kenosha. His sister would later tell police that he had informed their mother that he was going to spend the night at Black’s house. According to police documents, the boys decided that morning to join the volunteer effort to clean up damage from the night before. They borrowed cleaning supplies from Black’s stepfather, who had already gone to work. They also took Rittenhouse’s gun, which Black’s stepfather had moved from the safe in the garage to inside the house to protect himself during the unrest. Black usually carried his own assault rifle, disassembled, in the trunk of his car.
A short time later, a photographer captured Rittenhouse scrubbing graffiti at a local high school, a yellow bottle of chemical cleaner in one latex-gloved hand and a brush in the other. The words he was trying to erase were “fuck 12 bitches,” with “12” being slang for police, but they didn’t seem to be coming off. His expression was grim. His opinion of the protests may have been captured by a social media post he reportedly made in which he captioned a mug shot of Blake: “lol, he’s innocent.”
In the afternoon, the boys drove to a hunting-supply store and bought cheap military-style body slings for their assault rifles. They weren’t the only ones gearing up for that evening. Earlier in the day, a former Kenosha alderman who served as the administrator for the Facebook page of the Kenosha Guard, a local militia, posted a question: “Any patriots willing to take up arms and defend out [sic] City tonight from the evil thugs?” Soon the popular conspiracy-theory website Infowars boosted the post. According to analysis from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, from there the call to arms went national, with hundreds of RSVPs. Facebook pages for Kenosha-area militia groups began to fill with threats of violence against protesters. According to Buzzfeed, the Kenosha Guard event was flagged for Facebook moderators at least 455 times. The company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, would later describe the failure to remove the post as an “operational mistake.” Just as social media had drawn left-leaning activists to Kenosha, now it was summoning a coalition of right-wing militia to oppose them—and supercharging political unrest.
Around 4 p.m., Rittenhouse and Black walked to a used-car dealership called Car Source, which they planned to guard that night. Black had previously worked there and later told police, “The owner asked us if we would go there [and] just make sure [protesters] don’t burn the whole place down.” The boys’ apparent plan was to stand on the roof of the boarded-up garage and, if people threatened any of the 20 or so cars in the lot, Black explained, “we yell at them to ‘Get back! Get back!’ We don’t point, we don’t shoot or anything.” The two teenagers were led by a 20-something local they’d linked up with, who, like Black, had a professional relationship with the Car Source owners. (In a brief phone call, the proprietors declined to answer questions but have stated elsewhere that they didn’t pay or ask for help from Rittenhouse and Black.)
Evening descended. Militia began pulling up to the Car Source lot in trucks and asking where they should station themselves, evidentially recognizing allies by their white skin and long guns. Black told the men he didn’t know what was going on. Eventually, the arriving militia assembled around two gas stations at the southern end of the block; according to one militiaman, the owner of one establishment was giving out free drinks and thanking people for coming. Some of the militia were Kenoshans seeking to protect their city. Others, however, wore the Hawaiian shirts of the nihilistic Boogaloo Bois, a group whose most extreme members seek to overthrow the government. A Facebook post suggested some may have been a part of another militaristic anti-government faction called the Three Percenters. A third constituency was a “biker crew,” carrying “hatchets, ball bats, and firearms,” as one militiaman described them. That man also recounted that four people had told him they’d come from Canada.
Some left-wing activists may have traveled similar distances. One independent journalist, who had extensively filmed protests in the Northwest, told me that he recognized multiple protesters from Seattle and Portland. Kenosha had become a battleground for some of the most committed warriors on both sides of America’s ideological divide, and Rittenhouse was now in the midst of it.
Around 6 p.m., a 31-year-old man named Ryan Balch approached the Car Source lot. He wore tactical gear from his Army infantry days, and he later provided a written account of his impression of Rittenhouse’s group: “Realizing that they were undermanned and had no leadership…we joined them and I inserted myself into a tactical advisement role.” Balch was accompanied by several other experienced militiamen who had carpooled to Kenosha with him. They had avoided the roadblocks police had set up by looping south across the Illinois border and then traveled along the back roads into town. Balch explained to me that Rittenhouse and the other young men “all told us they were of legal age,” and he watched as someone turned over the keys to the garage, allaying his concern that the boys didn’t have a right to be there.
Balch did notice, however, that the boy wearing the backward American-flag baseball cap appeared to be in over his head. One of Balch’s militia partners, another infantry veteran, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity and whom I’ll call Smith, criticized the “lazy, la-di-da, la-di-da way” Rittenhouse and the other young men let their weapons drift into dangerous positions. Black told investigators that Kyle’s gun skills were “horrible.” Still, no one tried to call off the 17-year-old. According to a certain type of American logic, his gun made him a patriotic militiaman and granted him the right to be there.
Rittenhouse’s civil defense lawyer, Robert Barnes, emphasized that Kyle was not a member of any militia and that he hadn’t met Balch before, though the two would coordinate throughout the night as part of a team of about seven people who had taken it upon themselves to guard the lot.
As night fell, Black was on the roof of the garage with his rifle and scope, providing overwatch protection. Balch patrolled and tried to keep an eye on Rittenhouse, who spent much of his time at the front of the lot, clutching his assault rifle and staring toward the Civic Center, about a tenth of a mile away. Soon they could hear screaming, sirens, and flash-bang grenades as protesters there defied the curfew.
At the Civic Center, a tall, fit man named Gaige Grosskreutz strode through the chaos. He was dressed in street clothes like the protesters, except for his baseball hat labeled “PARAMEDIC.” Actually, Grosskreutz preferred the term “street medic” and had served as a self-appointed provider of medical aid at numerous protests throughout the summer. In an orange backpack he carried bandages, solution for washing tear gas from eyes, chest seals, and a tourniquet—supplies he never expected he might need for himself. He also had a pistol, tucked under his T-shirt, for self-defense; though he had had some misdemeanor scrapes with the law, he had no felonies and had a concealed-carry permit.
After finishing up his part-time job at a high-end grocery store, Grosskreutz had taken the country roads from Milwaukee to Kenosha, hid his vehicle far from downtown, disabled facial ID on his phone so police couldn’t force it open if they had him handcuffed, and then walked to the Civic Center. He arrived around the time that several hundred protesters defied warnings to disperse with cries of “Black Lives Matter!” One demonstrator, wearing a disturbingly realistic skull mask, burned numerous American flags while others pumped their fists. Soon the crowd began pelting police with rocks and fireworks, to which law enforcement responded with tear gas and pepper balls. Grosskreutz kept to the fringes of the conflict, attending to minor injuries and instructing others on how to flush tear gas out of eyes.
Unlike many street medics, whose credentials merely consisted of two strips of red duct tape pasted into a cross on their backpacks, Grosskreutz had worked in ambulances as a paramedic. But several years earlier he had enrolled in college, hoping to combine his medical skills with a new profession, like educating kids in the outdoors. Earlier that summer, though, at a Milwaukee protest following the death of George Floyd, he’d seen a demonstrator take a dangerous fall and realized that he could help, especially as ambulances often can’t enter the fray of a protest. Soon, he had outfitted a pickup truck with medical supplies—making it into a sort of improvised ambulance—and started showing up regularly at Black Lives Matter protests. He quickly became a leader among Milwaukee-area street medics and, despite his own leftist politics, committed himself to treating anybody who needed assistance.
Now, he kept an eye out for the serious injuries, as the conflict escalated. When police released a fog of teargas, a demonstrator with a leaf blower began redirecting it toward the police line. Snipers on the roof of the courthouse tried to blast the man with pepper balls as protesters used trash can-lids to shield him. Soon, a line of cops advanced, led by an armored personnel carrier, until a man in a construction worker’s hard hat planted himself in front of the military transporter with an umbrella, as if he could repel it as easily as rain. Dozens of cameras recorded the photogenic moment. The protesters weren’t just battling for the park, but public opinion. Soon, the umbrella man was grabbed by officers, and the authorities kept advancing.
Then Grosskreutz heard a scream. About 50 feet away, a young woman was curled up on the ground. A rubber bullet had lacerated her arm. Grosskreutz applied direct pressure to stem the bleeding. Then another medic tapped him on the shoulder, warning, “We’ve got to go! They’re coming!” The “storm trooper march,” as Grosskreutz called it, had bulldozed the rest of the protesters out of the Civic Center, and police were so close he could see the laces of their boots. He and the other medic removed the young woman from the chaos, carrying her to a grassy embankment, where they finished bandaging her before she was taken by private car to a hospital.
Under the direction of his lawyer, Grosskreutz declined to describe what happened next. But videos show he rejoined the protesters as the police drove them south, toward where Rittenhouse and the militia awaited.
Not long before the protesters were flushed in his direction, Ryan Balch was talking to a police officer near the used-car lot he and Rittenhouse were guarding. As Balch recalled it—and Smith, his militia partner, confirmed—the officer told them, “Okay, we’re going to start pushing them down here soon, and it’ll be up to you guys.”
Balch responded to her, “So you’re going to piss these people off and then push them at us and then leave?”
The two men say that the officer, having delivered her warning, pulled away in a patrol car. (The Kenosha Police Department, which will be contesting multimillion-dollar legal claims alleging that its officers contributed to the violence, declined to comment.) Balch remembered that when Rittenhouse noticed his concern, the youth “was like, ‘Uh-oh.’”
The former infantryman had taken the nervous Rittenhouse under his wing, thinking he could keep an eye on him. Rittenhouse had claimed to be an EMT, and Balch also figured having a medic on hand could be useful. (Rittenhouse, in fact, had only first aid certifications from his work as a lifeguard.) “Our job is to protect this business, and part of my job is to help people,” Rittenhouse told journalist Richie McGinniss of The Daily Caller on-camera that night. “That’s why I have my rifle, because I need to protect myself, obviously. But I also have my med kit.”
What happened next is recorded in the numerous hours of footage that GQ synced together. From the auto shop, the militia watched as four armored personnel carriers—so-called BearCats—driving abreast, advanced on the crowd fleeing the Civic Center. The protesters tried kneeling in the street and chanting, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!,” setting up a blockade of dumpsters, and hurling fireworks at the BearCats, but the demonstrators were driven relentlessly south by rubber bullets and tear gas. As the crowd reached Car Source, Balch began shooing away protesters, who looked wound-up and disheveled and on the videos.
The militia quickly found reason to feel antagonized by the protesters, and vice versa. Demonstrators exchanged angry words with militiamen flashing laser gunsights at them, and it seems that protesters may have thrown “ammonia bombs”—which Rittenhouse, blinking back tears, would describe in a raspy voice to a video journalist as “ammonia, gasoline, and bleach” that had been mixed in small plastic bags that would explode when thrown. Still, both sides maintained a relative truce, and Rittenhouse even appeared to treat a young female protester whose foot had been injured by a rubber bullet.
Things started to escalate when the BearCats pushed the throng of protesters south past the Car Source to the two gas stations where many of the militia had gathered. Soon protesters rolled a wheeled dumpster into the street with a thunderous rattle and then set its contents on fire, intending to propel it toward the police. Before they could, a militiaman in camo pants blasted the burning dumpster with a fire extinguisher. Protesters and militia faced off, screaming. At the center of the confrontation was an enraged stocky white man, in a red T-shirt, who shouted repeatedly in the face of a white militiaman, daring the militiaman to shoot him. This was Joseph Rosenbaum, the first person Rittenhouse would kill. But not quite yet.
“It’s not worth it,” a bystander yelled. “You’re going to get us all shot!”
Protesters pulled Rosenbaum back, and militiamen talked down their guy.
The police withdrew in their BearCats back toward the Civic Center, leaving the protesters and militia to face off against each other. A Black man in a Black Lives Matter mask racked the slide of his pistol, and militia readied their guns. Cries of “Focus on the real enemy” zeroed protesters back in on the police, and they chased the BearCats north, reclaiming the flaming dumpster and pushing it up past the Car Source lot.
Once more the BearCats routed the protesters from the Civic Center. As the protesters again retreated past the Car Source lot, one of Balch and Rittenhouse’s fellow guards tried to stop some of them from reigniting the dumpster and got into a shouting match. Balch attempted to deescalate the situation. Meanwhile, Rittenhouse grabbed the dumpster and pulled it to the side of the road, away from the protesters, presumably so they couldn’t reignite it. A conservative video journalist, Kristan T. Harris, noticed and warned Rittenhouse, “Hey, your job is not to be in the street. Your job is to protect the property.… Don’t look for trouble where there ain’t none.”
Rittenhouse suggested he needed to be in the action to offer help as a medic. Harris responded that “they got their own medics, you know.” When Rittenhouse retorted, Harris explained that the protesters were afraid of the teenager, though Rittenhouse seemed to not fully understand why. Throughout the many filmed encounters that show Rittenhouse offering medical aid to protesters—most of them rebuffed—he appeared incapable or unwilling to see himself and his group as others had that night: as threatening white men who had shown up to a racial-justice protest armed with assault weapons.
The demonstrators probably weren’t wrong to suspect that the militia groups may have harbored racists. Some internet posts purporting to be from militia featured extremely disturbing racialized threats, several involving the murder and rape of children of color. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Balch’s own online presence was troubling: “[He] used his social media accounts to link to a Nazi propaganda video, amplified white nationalist Richard Spencer, and uploaded symbols associated with the so-called Boogaloo [Bois] movement,” the anti-government militia. Balch disavowed the posts to me as “shit posting” and apologized to those who were offended, adding, “I take my personal responsibility for it.”
Before the clash around the reignited dumpster could get further out of hand, the police in the approaching BearCats warned everyone to disperse and then released tear gas. Militia and protesters scrambled for cover. Once the irritating cloud had drifted off, the police offered some indication about whom they’d been targeting: An officer asked through a megaphone if any of the men guarding Car Source needed water, either to drink or to wash their eyes with. Rittenhouse answered in the affirmative. A hatch opened on the top of a BearCat and a police officer tossed water bottles down while the megaphone crackled: “We appreciate you guys, we really do.”
Video of this scene would raise accusations of police favoritism toward the right-wing militias. The Kenosha Police Department would ultimately charge about 150 protesters with curfew violations, but the only person coordinating with militia who would receive a similar citation was Rittenhouse—and then only months after the event.
Soon the BearCats re-established their barricade near the gas stations. Rittenhouse and Balch’s group were to the north of the police, the protesters to the south. Around this time, Rittenhouse excitedly explained on camera to McGinnis, the video journalist, that he and Balch “are out here running and saving people with medical.” At which point, Balch, sucking his lip and looking a little annoyed, said, “Speaking of which, we need to go check if someone got hurt again.” They walked south, passing the BearCats, heading toward the protesters. Though they didn’t know it, they had just effectively cut themselves off from backup—the police wouldn’t let anyone cross back over their line. Balch soon got into a brief argument with a demonstrator, who criticized him for bringing a gun to a peaceful protest, and afterwards, when he looked around, he realized that he had lost Rittenhouse.
Recordings show that Rittenhouse wandered south by himself, still shouting offers of medical help, perhaps showing off for McGinnis, who was tailing him with a camera. Instead of the heroic welcome Rittenhouse seems to have expected, a young Black man called Rittenhouse out for previously brandishing his gun at him; Rittenhouse huffed away, and McGinnis stayed to talk to the young man.
Less than three minutes after crossing south of the BearCats, Rittenhouse was captured on video, having turned north, approaching the armored personnel carriers on his way back toward the Car Source lot. A BearCat megaphone blared: “This road is closed! Do not come down here! Do not come down here!” Rittenhouse raised a surgical-gloved hand and pointed toward the Car Source lot. “I work for that business!”
“You cannot come down here. This area is clear.”
Rittenhouse tried arguing a bit more but then, visibly frustrated, drifted back toward a group of protesters clustered around one of the gas stations.
According to the account Dominick Black gave police, it was around this time that the militiamen at Car Source got a call that another parking lot owned by the dealership was being attacked, with cars being smashed and fires ignited. Because this lot was south of the police barricade, Rittenhouse was best positioned to check it out. Apparently, someone called him and relayed the message. Rittenhouse grabbed a fire extinguisher, likely from bystanders, and hoofed it south. Black, positioned on the roof, saw his friend run toward the southern lot before disappearing into the dark distance.
Many protesters were drifting south too, including a stocky white man who had wrapped his red T-shirt around his bald head, protecting his eyes from tear gas and his identity from cameras. This was Joseph Rosenbaum, who earlier had dared the militiaman to shoot him.
Rosenbaum, whose path to that evening would later be documented by The Washington Post, had just reached the nadir of a tragic life spent grappling with drugs, crime, and mental illness, during which he had served 14 years in prison for sexually abusing minors. Earlier that day, he had been discharged from a mental health treatment program, to which he’d been committed after several recent attempts to take his own life. When he tried to pick up his bipolar medication, he found the pharmacy closed because of the protests, and when he attempted to reunite with his former partner, she reportedly warned him he could be jailed for violating a no-contact order put in place after he’d assaulted her. He rode a bus downtown and joined the demonstration. Balch told me that around the time when protesters clashed with militia, Rosenbaum threatened to hurt him and Rittenhouse if he ever caught them alone.
When Rittenhouse arrived at the unguarded Car Source lot, vandals were hammering vehicles with baseball bats and setting cars aflame. A police investigator later wrote that Rittenhouse “told someone to stop hitting windows. The male he had spoken to then came at him and Kyle had to protect himself.” Black also told police that Rittenhouse later offered him a similar explanation. (Barnes, Rittenhouse’s civil attorney, suggested to me that his client may have tried to use the fire extinguisher on a small fire, in which Rosenbaum was involved, prompting the confrontation.) Nick Dennis, just across the street, saw Rosenbaum start to chase Rittenhouse and then turned his livestream on them.
Multiple recordings captured Rosenbaum pursuing Rittenhouse across the car lot. Rosenbaum hurled a plastic bag at Rittenhouse—in it were the deodorant stick, underwear, and socks that the hospital had discharged him with. A bystander fired a pistol into the air for unclear reasons, perhaps to freeze everyone with fright. Rittenhouse turned. Rosenbaum lunged toward him, yelling, “Fuck you!” Rittenhouse blasted him with four .223 rounds that shattered his pelvis, tore through his right lung, liver, and left hand, carved into his left thigh, and scored his forehead, according to police records. Then Rittenhouse fled.
McGinnis, who had been just feet away, attempting to film the confrontation, stripped off his shirt and tried to bandage Rosenbaum’s wounds. Rosenbaum’s body fought for life, spasming and moaning, before going limp. A throng of protesters bore Rosenbaum across the street, where coincidentally a hospital was located—but he was already gone.
As Rittenhouse ran north, Grosskreutz was hurrying south toward the tinny sound of faraway gunshots. With his cell phone he filmed Rittenhouse laboring past him in his unwieldy cowboy boots, pursued by shouts. Grosskreutz demanded: “Hey, what are you doing? You shot somebody?”
“I’m going to the police,” Rittenhouse answered over his shoulder, still fleeing.
“Who’s shot? Who’s shot?” Grosskreutz yelled. Rittenhouse didn’t answer. Then Grosskreutz yelled, “Hey, stop him!” Grosskreutz pursued Rittenhouse, withdrawing the pistol tucked in the waistband of his shorts.
Rittenhouse tripped. When Anthony Huber, a 26-year-old father figure to his girlfriend’s two children, smacked him with his skateboard, Rittenhouse sent a bullet through Huber’s “heart, aorta, pulmonary artery, and right lung,” according to police reports, killing him.
Then Grosskreutz towered over the fallen Rittenhouse, a pistol in his right hand. That’s when Rittenhouse blew off Grosskreutz’s right biceps, his bullet exploding a tattoo of caduceus, the winged staff entwined with snakes that is the symbol of Western medicine.
Rittenhouse stood. The boy who had so often been bullied watched everyone flee him. Balch and Smith were running down the street toward him, but at this point there was no way to save him from what he had done. As gunfire from elsewhere hammered the night, and sirens wailed, Rittenhouse jogged towards the BearCats. A bystander yelled, “Dude right here shot all of them down there,” and then kept trying to inform the police.
Approaching the BearCats, Rittenhouse raised his hands. But he didn’t keep them up and handled his weapon multiple times; cops have shot people for much less. But the police ignored the white kid and rumbled their BearCats toward the crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters. Rittenhouse tried to turn himself in at a patrol car but was brushed away. And so, the unrest that began with a Kenosha police officer shooting a Black man seven times in the back ended with the department letting an armed white youth who had just killed two people and grievously wounded another walk free. Kenosha’s sheriff would later blame all this on “tunnel vision” created by the chaos.
After law enforcement had locked down the scene, Balch, Dennis, and others, gathered at the southernmost Car Source lot, trying to puzzle-fit together cellphone footage to figure out what happened, while behind them a car burned. Both sides assured the other that they understood their pain, that they were only trying to help, that nobody meant for this to happen. But what exactly had happened was impossible to sort out, and so eventually the white militiaman and the Black activist shook hands in that what-more-can-be-said way of American males, and then they retreated to their respective fragments of the United States.
At the auto-body shop, Rittenhouse told Black what he’d done.
They drove to the apartment of Rittenhouse’s mother, in Illinois. According to police documents, Wendy Lewis suggested to her son that he flee. Rittenhouse insisted on turning himself in at a nearby police station.
There, for the rest of the night, he cycled through fits of crying, throwing up, and then calming down again. When he and Lewis were left alone in an interrogation room, a CCTV camera recorded them weeping and hugging. “I’m gonna need therapy,” he said to her. He told a police officer, “I know this fucked me up.… I’m not a child anymore.” The police, whose ranks he had wanted to join his whole life, were now his jailers, and he begged them to delete his social media accounts, as they had possession of his phone.
Eventually, Rittenhouse would be charged with first-degree reckless homicide for slaying Rosenbaum, first-degree intentional homicide for killing Huber, and attempted intentional homicide for shooting Grosskreutz, as well as two counts of recklessly endangering the safety of others and use of a dangerous weapon for almost hitting bystanders, including McGinniss, and one count of possessing a dangerous weapon while underage.
The country immediately set to arguing about whether Rittenhouse was good or evil, and whether his actions were self-defense. Three nights of Americans attacking each other, their community, and their government, were reduced to parsing the split-second decisions of a minor, rather than reckoning with what the tragedies in Kenosha revealed about our society’s more foundational problems.
As Rittenhouse was characterized on the left as a murderer and a white supremacist, he became a cause célèbre on the right. A team of high-profile conservative lawyers took his case and portrayed him as a patriot defending small businesses and then himself with his Second Amendment rights. Extensive favorable coverage on conservative media helped raise $2 million for his bail. Rittenhouse and his mother opened an online store that peddled “Free Kyle” merchandise, including bikinis for $43, and the clothing became popular at rightwing rallies. A photo posted to social media around Christmastime showed Rittenhouse at the beach in sunglasses and a green t-shirt that featured a “don’t-tread-on-me” viper wrapped around an assault rifle stamped with the message: “Come and Take It.”
Other survivors are grappling with wounds that are proving difficult to heal.
Grosskreutz’s arm was saved, but his rehab has been grueling. He has redoubled his activism and is helping set up an organization to train street medics.
Blake was paralyzed from the waist down and is struggling to get healthy; the charge
of sexual assault was dropped, and he pleaded guilty to two lesser charges of disorderly conduct.
Meanwhile, the bloodshed in Kenosha increasingly seemed less like an isolated incident than the first in a series of battles, as liberals and conservatives shot, stabbed, beat, and rammed vehicles into one another, at demonstrations from Oregon to Colorado, Washington State to Washington, D.C., resulting in serious injuries and deaths.
Early this January it was announced that no charges would be filed against Sheskey for shooting Blake; investigators concluded that Blake had possessed a knife, which would allow the officer to effectively claim self-defense at a trial. Despite frigid temperatures in Kenosha, Dennis led protests in the streets. Since the events in August, he had devoted himself fulltime to activism. “I went from not caring to caring,” he said. “It changed me as a man.” Along with two friends, he had launched an organization, United Black Men and Women Corporation, which helped with voter registration drives and coordinated charitable deliveries of food to Kenosha’s poor. “I felt like that [Blake decision] was like a slap in the face,” he said, and it made him believe that the country had “a lot of work to do.”
That same afternoon, Rittenhouse pleaded not guilty to all charges. The trial would be many months and legal maneuvers away. According to court documents, about 90 minutes after his hearing, he showed up at a bar. He had changed from a blue collared shirt and black tie, police colors, to a gray T-shirt that read: “FREE AS FUCK.” Prosecutors in his case alleged that security videos show that immediately upon arriving at the bar, he posed for pictures with some men flashing the “okay” hand sign, which has recently been adopted by the white-power movement; Rittenhouse was also serenaded by five men with “Proud of Your Boy,” the anthem of the Proud Boys, an organization the FBI has categorized as an extremist group with ties to white nationalism. (Barnes, Rittenhouses’s civil laywer, told me that his client was simply indulging the request for a picture from men he had not known beforehand and disputed the notion that the “okay” hand sign had anything to do with white power.)
The next day, while Congress was tallying the electoral votes to certify the presidential election of Joe Biden, Donald Trump inspired thousands of his supporters to storm the Capitol. According to criminal charges, alleged Proud Boys were part of the mob that overran a perimeter of police, seen in video leading a chant of “Whose house is this? Our house!” Criminal charges also assert it was a Proud Boy who smashed through a Capitol window with a stolen police shield, letting protesters into the building. The violence that had been confined to America’s streets poured into its most sacred halls. Rittenhouse’s killings increasingly looked like shots in a new phase of our slow-breaking civil war.
In all the months I spent reporting about the tragedy in Kenosha, I kept searching for any scrap of agreement between the warring sides. Everyone claimed that they were defending the true America, but self-defense against the self-defense of others only seemed to result in ever more intensifying conflict. The only moment when Americans seemed able to unify was when a human life hung in the balance.
Grosskreutz was kneeling on the pavement, just after he was shot, blood gushing from the crater in his arm, howling for help.
A video journalist who’d been livestreaming the altercation, CJ Halliburton, reached him first. Grosskreutz directed Halliburton to the tourniquet in his medic backpack. Halliburton got the device applied to Grosskreutz’s wounded arm but didn’t know how to correctly tighten it.
Smith, the militiaman, had rushed toward the sound of the gunshots and used his Army training to offer instruction on how to correctly torque down the trauma bandage, while Grosskreutz weighed in as well. Balch stood watch against more threats and then put a hand on Grosskreutz’s shoulder, as if trying to comfort him. A picture captured the men huddling around the wounded street medic, striving as a team to keep him alive.
Behind them loomed Death. Not the Grim Reaper, but rather the demonstrator in the skull mask—the one who had been burning American flags in protest at the Civic Center earlier that night. From this man’s neck chains dangled a last shred of the Stars and Stripes. In the moment captured by the photograph, Death reached toward the Americans with a single black-gloved hand. It was impossible to tell if Death was trying to help or making a claim. For even though Grosskreutz would survive, Death is patient. In the end, all men and nations are owed unto him.
Doug Bock Clark is a GQ correspondent. Jacqueline Costello provided research assistance.
A version of this story originally appeared in the April 2021 issue with the title "American Battlefield: 72 Hours in Kenosha."
