© Screenshot Richie McGinnissKyle Rittenhouse
"Oh shit, I gotta go!" Richie McGinniss hangs up on me.
It's not hard to spot the group of people clustered at a gas station. A car partially obscures the scene, but the bright lights of the boarded up business still highlight some members of the small crowd.
I start jogging toward the station, phone in hand, ready to record. Richie, our director of video, told me earlier on that phone call that he was following a group of armed individuals at the time. I remembered them - their arrival near the courthouse, the fights that had broken out with them earlier in the evening, how one member of the group seemed too nervous to be handling a weapon.
The scene there is chaotic - people yelling, shoving, making threats, then a crowd chasing a young man. Richie is already onsite and, as I'm heading to meet him, the moments leading up to the first shooting are already playing out. Richie sees the alleged shooter hurrying down the street, gun in one hand and fire extinguisher in the other, until he reaches a sort of corner in the parking lot of the gas station.
Meanwhile, I'm moving more rapidly toward the chaos. The key moments caught on video begin to come into focus for me, although I'm not close enough to make out specific faces yet. There's a loud bang. I stop immediately - I didn't grow up around guns. It sounds like a gunshot. I'm just not sure.
A few beats go by after the first shot - enough time for me to be able to get out my phone. As if on autopilot, I hit the record button.
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