Witness Recalls Seeing Heather Heyer Right After Car Attack

“I remember seeing her eyes and thinking, that’s what someone’s eyes look like when they’re dead”
By Luke Roney,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 30, 2018 2:34 PM CST
Witness Recalls Seeing Heather Heyer Right After Car Attack
In this Aug. 12, 2017, file photo, James Alex Fields Jr., left, holds a black shield in Charlottesville, Va., where a white supremacist rally took place.   (Alan Goffinski via AP, File)

On the fifth day of the trial of James Alex Fields Jr., who is accused of using his car to run down counter-protesters during a “Unite the Right” rally last year, witness Star Peterson described seeing the face of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who was killed in the incident, moments after the alleged attack. “I remember seeing her eyes and thinking, that’s what someone’s eyes look like when they’re dead,” she said Friday, per the Daily Progress. Fields, a 21-year-old white nationalist, faces a multitude of state and federal charges, including first-degree murder, in connection to the August 12, 2017, incident in Charlottesville, Virginia. Fields reportedly says he was scared of the protesters around his car and acted in self-defense.

Another victim, 22-year-old Aubtin Heydari, described an upbeat scene right before Fields’ gray Dodge Challenger plowed into the crowd, Reuters reports. “A lot of people were singing protest songs and hymns, there was a lot of optimism,” he told the court on Thursday. The next thing, “I remember not being able to talk and blood running down my face.” As the Fields trial continues, some people in Charlottesville have been receiving robocalls that use racist and anti-Semitic language regarding Heyer’s death, CBS19 reports. The calls come from an Idaho-based group called The Road to Power, which has orchestrated similar calls in the past. The calls blame the Charlottesville mayor and police chief for Heyer’s death, WINA reports. (More James Alex Fields Jr. stories.)

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