Northern California man jailed after Charlottesville rally won’t do federal prison time
A Northern California man who attacked anti-racist protesters at 2017’s deadly Charlottesville rally will not serve federal prison time, the Associated Press reported.
U.S. District Court Judge Norman Moon sentenced Cole Evan White, 26, of Clayton in Contra Costa County, to 14 months in prison, but counted his seven months in a Virginia jail and the five months White served under house arrest toward the sentence, the AP reported.
White was a member of white supremacists Rise Above Movement. He and three others affiliated with the group were charged with conspiring to riot at the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Video footage showed White head butting and bloodying a woman counterprotester and similarly striking a clergyman during the violent clash that ended with the death of another woman, Heather Heyer. The 32-year-old Heyer was killed when avowed neo-Nazi James Alex Fields plowed his speeding car into a crowd of demonstrators leaving the protest.
Fields is now serving a life sentence in federal prison after pleading guilty to 29 federal hate crime charges.
The same Virginia federal judge who ruled in White’s case Friday had sentenced White’s three confederates with two to three years’ federal prison time, but freed the California man because he worked with authorities and rejected the hateful ideology that led him to the white power group and to Charlottesville.
White and his ties to the supremacist group were in the news this week after it was learned that just days following the violent far-right rally and the infamous torch march with other extremists on the University of Virginia campus that preceded it, he had enrolled at San Francisco State University.
White continued his education at the San Francisco campus after pleading guilty to the conspiring to riot charge. University officials said they learned of White’s Virginia arrest and his subsequent plea from an Associated Press reporter who asked about White’s academic status. California State University schools do not ask about an applicant’s criminal history, the university told the AP.
White has also worked for his father’s sprinkler repair company in Clayton, about 80 miles southwest of Sacramento, according to the Associated Press.
University officials told the AP this week that White studies part-time at the campus and first enrolled in the fall 2017 term.
San Francisco State “unequivocally condemned white supremacy” in a Monday statement to the Associated Press.
“We send our compassion and concern to those affected by the events of that tragic weekend, specifically the victims and the families of those who were targeted by individuals motivated by hate.”
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