Daily Beast: Charlottesville Victim Faces Down Rally Organizers in Court
By: Integrity First For America News CoverageBy Kelly Weill, The Daily Beast. Read the full article here.
On August 11, 2017, University of Virginia student Natalie Romero returned to campus after a summer break in Houston. She remembers the drive into Charlottesville. “I was like a dog at the window, smelling the air,” she told a courtroom on Friday. The college sophomore spent the day reuniting with friends.
“I took my last selfie there without my face—well, what it looks like now,” Romero testified.
Hours after she arrived on campus, she and her friends would be staring down hundreds of white supremacists in the beginning of a two-day rally that left one woman dead and dozens, including Romero, seriously injured.
Romero was the first of nine plaintiffs to take the stand in Sines v. Kessler, a landmark lawsuit against the organizers of the deadly Unite The Right rally. During that two-day event, a coalition of far-right figures descended on Charlottesville for a torchlit march, followed by a daylight rally that ended when a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of counter-demonstrators, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Plaintiffs in Sines v. Kessler argue that the rally’s organizers deliberately set the stage for violence. On Friday, Romero faced off against those organizers in court.