KENOSHA, Wis. (CBS Chicago/CBS News) — Prosecutors in Kenosha County, Wisconsin said in a filing Wednesday that Kyle Rittenhouse flashed white power hand gestures and had the Proud Boys’ anthem sung to him in a Wisconsin bar last week.
Rittenhouse is accused of shooting and killing two people and wounding a third during civil unrest in Kenosha days after the shooting of Jacob Blake by police there. He was spotted at Pudgy’s Pub in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin on Tuesday, Jan. 5, the same day he was pleaded not guilty to charges of shooting and killing two people and injuring a third during violent protests in Kenosha this summer.
In a filing Wednesday, Kenosha County Assistant District Attorney Thomas C. Binger wrote that he had reviewed video surveillance from that day. He wrote that Rittenhouse arrived at the bar at 2:30 p.m. along with his mother and several other adults, and stayed until just after 4 p.m.
Still images from that day show Rittenhouse first posing for photos outside the bar with two adult men who arrived with him, the filing said. In each, Rittenhouse and one of the men flash the “OK” sign.
Other screen grabs show Rittenhouse posing for several photographs in a T-shirt which reads, “Free as F**k,” and again flashing the “OK” sign with the adults in the bar, the filing said. The “OK” sign, prosecutors noted, has been co-opted as a white power gesture by “known white supremacist groups.” The hand symbol began as a hoax by users of the website 4chan before turning into a popular trolling tactic, the Anti-Defamation League explained in 2019. By that year, it had evolved into a gesture embraced “in some circles as a sincere expression of white supremacy,” the civil rights group said.