Jury convicts man who wounded black protesters in Minnesota

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Scarsella, who is white, testified he was afraid of being attacked while filming the protest on the night of Nov. 23, 2015. He said a group of protesters accused him of being in the Ku Klux Klan and that someone had already punched him in the face. Scarsella said he and his friends tried to leave the protest but a group of men followed them and one pulled out what appeared to be a weapon, prompting Scarsella to open fire.

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Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman said his office will seek “the stiffest possible sentence” for Scarsella.

“We charged him with the most serious possible charge that the evidence allowed,” Freeman said in a statement.

Only one of the five victims attended the verdict. Cameron Clark, 26, Jamar Clark’s cousin, was shot by Scarsella in the right leg. Clark said he remembers Scarsella provoking protesters with racial slurs and luring a group of black men up the street where he turned and shot at them.

Clark attended parts of Scarsella’s testimony and said he had “butterflies” in his stomach before the verdict was read Wednesday afternoon.

“I was kind of really thinking that (the jurors) were going to be on his side and they were going to let him go because he was claiming self-defence,” Clark said afterward.

Clark and another victim — Tevin King — sustained bullet wounds near major arteries. Hennepin County Assistant Attorney Judith Hawley said King was shot in the abdomen and that the bullet is too close to his arteries to be removed. Injuries ranged from leg, arm and foot to stomach and back wounds.

The three other Minnesota men with Scarsella at the time — Daniel Macey of Pine City, Nathan Gustavsson of Hermantown and Joseph Backman of Eagan — are charged with second-degree riot and aiding an offender. All three have pleaded not guilty and await trial. In December, attorneys for the three men denied that their clients are racist. Macey is Asian, the others are white.

Hannah Weikel, The Associated Press