Prosecutor says Rittenhouse instigated Kenosha bloodshed

KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) — Kyle Rittenhouse instigated the confrontation that led him to shoot three people on the streets of Kenosha during a turbulent protest against racial injustice, and he killed one of the victims with a shot to the back, a prosecutor said during opening statements Tuesday at Rittenhouse's murder trial.

But Rittenhouse's attorney told the jury that his client acted in self-defense after one of the men dove for his gun and others kicked him in the face and clubbed him in the head with a skateboard.

“You as jurors will end up looking at it from the standpoint of a 17-year-old under the circumstances as they existed,” defense attorney Mark Richards said.

Rittenhouse, now 18, is charged with killing two men and wounding a third with an assault-style rifle during the summer of 2020. He could get life in prison if convicted.

The one-time aspiring police officer traveled to Kenosha from his home in Illinois, just across the Wisconsin state line, after protests broke out over the shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, in the back by a white Kenosha police officer. Rittenhouse said he went there to protect property after two nights in which rioters set fires and ransacked businesses.

In his opening statement, prosecutor Thomas Binger described the unrest as “two of the roughest nights that our community has ever seen," and said outsiders were drawn to Kenosha “like moths to a flame.”

Yet Binger repeatedly stressed that amid the hundreds of people in Kenosha and the anger and chaos in the streets, “the only person who killed anyone is the defendant, Kyle Rittenhouse.”

Binger told the jury that self-defense can be a valid claim only if Rittenhouse reasonably believed he was using deadly force to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm.

The prosecutor said...