Exposing Hate
attacked his wheelchair-bound mother several times, once with a knife.
He was a Nazi sympathizer and a member of Vanguard America, a
white supremacist group that believes the United States should be an
exclusively white nation.
At 1:14 p.m. that Saturday afternoon, Fields turned his car toward
a crowded intersection where counterprotesters had gathered. Fields
plowed into the crowd, sending bodies flying through the air. He threw
his car into reverse and backed into more people before speeding away.
Nineteen counterprotesters were injured in the attack. One of
them, Heather Heyer, died at the scene. Heyer was a thirty-two-year-old
Charlottesville resident and a paralegal with a local law firm. She was
also an activist, speaking out against inequality and encouraging her
coworkers to be more active in their community to fight for social justice.
She died from blunt-force injury to the chest after Fields’s car hit her.
The police arrested Fields about 1 mile (1.6 km) away from
the incident. They took him into custody and charged him with
Mourners and fellow activists set up an informal memorial to Heather Heyer, placing
flowers and tributes of love in the place where she was struck by Fields’s car
following the Unite the Right rally.
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