Richard W. Preston, 53, who was described as a Ku Klux Klan leader, was sentenced Tuesday to four years in prison for firing a gun at the rally.
Three men who took part in a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year were sentenced this week to several years in prison in connection with a couple of the event’s most violent episodes.
On Thursday, two of the men received prison time for participating in the beating of a black man in a garage. Jacob Scott Goodwin, 23, was sentenced to serve eight years, and Alex Michael Ramos, 34, received a sentence of six years.
Richard W. Preston, 53, who was described as a Ku Klux Klan leader, was sentenced Tuesday to four years in prison for firing a gun at the rally.
Goodwin, who is white, was found guilty this month of “malicious wounding” in the assault of DeAndre Harris, which was captured in a video that spread widely on social media. Ramos, who court records list as being Hispanic, was convicted in May of malicious wounding for his role in the beating.
Goodwin was sentenced to 10 years in prison, though two of those years were suspended. Ramos was sentenced to six years, and the judge added an additional three-year term that will be suspended on the condition that Ramos successfully completes three years of probation, according to his lawyer.
The video from Aug. 12, 2017, showed six men surrounding Harris and hitting him with wooden boards and a metal pipe. Harris, 21, suffered a head wound and a broken wrist.
Goodwin, of Ward, Arkansas, was described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white supremacist who wore pins celebrating Adolf Hitler and the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party. The SPLC, which tracks racist hate groups, also described Ramos, of Marietta, Georgia, as a former member of a militia group called the Georgia Security Force III.
The lawyer for Goodwin, who is also representing Preston, could not be reached for comment Thursday. Ramos’ lawyer had no comment apart from the details of his client’s sentence.
Two other men, Daniel P. Borden and Tyler Watkins Davis, were arrested in connection with the beating. Davis will face his trial later this year, and Borden pleaded guilty and awaits sentencing in October, according to court records.
On Tuesday, Preston, a Maryland man described as an imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, was sentenced in Charlottesville Circuit Court to four years in prison for firing a gun during the rally, the records show. As in the case of the garage beating, footage of Preston’s shooting also spread online, and amateur sleuths set out to identify the assailant.
In the video, released by the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, Preston was shown pulling out a handgun and firing at the ground in the direction of a black counterprotester, Corey A. Long, 24. At the time, Long was igniting a can of spray paint that a protester had thrown, turning it into an improvised flamethrower.
Joseph Platania, the commonwealth’s attorney, said in an email statement on Thursday about Preston’s Tuesday sentence: “After careful consideration of the evidence presented, the Commonwealth feels that Moore imposed a fair and just sentence for the choices Preston made on Aug. 12, 2017.”
He was not immediately available to comment on Thursday’s sentences.
No one was injured by the shot that Preston fired. The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia submitted the video to the FBI and the local police.
Preston, from Baltimore, was arrested on Aug. 30, 2017, and charged with discharging a firearm within 1,000 feet of a school, a crime punishable by two to 10 years in prison.
He pleaded no contest to the charge in May, records show, meaning he acknowledged that enough evidence existed to convict him, without admitting to committing a crime.
His sentence of eight years — four years of which was suspended — will be followed by three years of supervised probation, the records show.
The Daily Progress reported that at the hearing Tuesday, Platania said Preston was lucky the conflict did not escalate after he fired his gun. “It’s difficult to describe how poorly that could have gone,” he said.
Woodard had argued that Preston was defending himself and his friends from “a wall of flames,” the newspaper reported.
Judge Richard E. Moore, noting Preston’s anger in the video, said, “I don’t find you were saving anyone’s life,” the newspaper reported.
The Baltimore Sun, in a profile, reported that Preston founded the KKK chapter in Cecil County, Maryland, in 2013. He was identified from the video as the imperial wizard of the Confederate White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan shortly after the rally, the SPLC said.
In an interview posted on YouTube in 2015, Preston said the Klan was a “Christian, white patriotic” organization. “We’re here for America,” he said.
He kept the same line in 2017 shortly after his attendance at the “Unite the Right” rally, telling an Indiana TV station: “We didn’t go as the Klan.”
“We didn’t go there to create havoc and fight. We went there to protect a monument,” he said, referring to the protest by white nationalists over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.
But the rally turned violent — and then deadly. A 32-year-old woman, Heather D. Heyer, was killed when a man drove into a crowd of counterprotesters. James Alex Fields Jr., who was charged with first-degree murder in 2017, faces new hate crimes under a federal indictment announced in June.
Long, who has said that he was protecting an older white man when he ignited the spray can, faces a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge, court records show. He will stand trial in January.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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