CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. -- Records from 911 calls show the driver charged with killing a woman at a white supremacist rally was previously accused of beating his mother and threatening her with a knife.
Authorities say 20-year-old James Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters on Saturday in Charlottesville. At least two dozen were wounded in addition to Heather Heyer, the woman killed.
James Alex Fields Jr.
The records the Florence Police Department in Kentucky show the man's mother had called police in 2011. Records show Fields' mother, Samantha Bloom, told police he stood behind her wielding a 12-inch knife. Bloom is disabled and uses a wheelchair.
In another incident in 2010, Bloom said that Fields smacked her in the head and locked her in the bathroom after she told him to stop playing video games. Bloom told officers Fields was on medication to control his temper.
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Bloom told The Associated Press on Saturday night she knew her son was attending a rally in Virginia but didn’t know it was a white supremacist rally.
"I thought it had something to do with Trump. Trump’s not a white supremacist," said Bloom, who became visibly upset as she learned of the injuries and deaths at the rally.
Fields is being held without bail on charges of second-degree murder, malicious wounding and failure to stop in an accident that resulted in death.
A teacher at Fields' high school, in nearby Union, Kentucky, said he was "very infatuated" with Nazis and Adolf Hitler and espoused their ideology. Derek Weimer, who taught two history courses to Fields at Randall K. Cooper High School, also recalled Fields wondering what society might be like if the Allies hadn't won.
"'What if Hitler had won? What if we had this large white supremacist empire going into the modern world?' -- that (Hitler's) views were right," Weimer said.
Classmates who traveled to Europe with Fields said he was open about those views.
“He would proclaim himself as a Nazi … it was not a secret,” one woman said.
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A photo from Saturday appears to show Fields with Vanguard America, a white supremacist organization. The group denied he was a member.
James Alex Fields was w/ the Vanguard America folks in #Charlottesville. Learn more about the group > https://t.co/HNloF8Btnf @ADL_National pic.twitter.com/TmJLi0kfZo
— Oren Segal (@orensegal) August 13, 2017
People around the nation marched Sunday in support of the anti-racism protesters in Charlottesville, with more than 130 rallies from California to Maine.
