Charlottesville, VA Protest: Timeline, Prosecutions, and Civil Suit

The Charlottesville, Virginia protest of August 11 and 12, 2017 — the “Unite the Right” rally — was the largest public gathering of white supremacists in the United States in decades, organized to oppose the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue and ending with three people dead and dozens injured. A neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer, and two Virginia State Police pilots died when their helicopter crashed while monitoring the unrest. The events produced life sentences for the driver, a multimillion-dollar civil judgment against the rally’s organizers, and an independent review that concluded the city had “protected neither free expression nor public safety.”¹

How the Rally Came Together

Local activist Jason Kessler organized the event with support from Richard Spencer, who styled himself the leader of the “alt-right.” The stated purpose was to protest the Charlottesville City Council’s decision to remove Confederate statues from two downtown parks, including a bronze equestrian Lee statue that had stood since 1924. Participants traveled from across the country and included members of neo-Nazi groups, the Ku Klux Klan, the League of the South, Identity Evropa, Vanguard America, and various militias.²

The Torch March on August 11

On Friday evening, hundreds of white nationalists gathered at a Walmart parking lot outside the city, then marched across the University of Virginia campus carrying tiki torches. They chanted racist and antisemitic slogans, including “Blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.” The marchers converged on the university’s Thomas Jefferson statue, where they clashed with a smaller group of counter-protesters. An interfaith prayer service was underway nearby at St. Paul’s Memorial Episcopal Church at the time.²³

Violence and Chaos on August 12

By early Saturday morning, armed militia members, rally participants, and counter-protesters were converging around the Lee statue. Rocks, bottles, and improvised weapons flew between the groups. Pepper spray and smoke grenades filled the air. Police stationed behind barricades away from the clashes largely did not intervene.³

Before noon, Governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency and authorities ordered the rally dispersed as an unlawful assembly. The dispersal itself deepened the chaos: police pushed rally-goers out of the park directly into crowds of counter-protesters, with no corridors separating the two sides.¹

The Car Attack That Killed Heather Heyer

Shortly after the rally was declared unlawful, 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr., an avowed neo-Nazi from Ohio, got into his Dodge Challenger. He drove to Fourth Street, a narrow one-way street near the downtown pedestrian mall where a racially diverse crowd of counter-protesters had gathered. Fields reversed uphill, stopped, then accelerated rapidly, plowing through a stop sign and into the crowd before slamming into another vehicle. He then fled in reverse.⁴

The attack killed Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal from Charlottesville, and injured 35 others.⁵ Federal prosecutors later presented evidence that Fields had contemplated harming people with his car before arriving in Charlottesville and had previously shared a social media image of a vehicle driving into a crowd.⁶

The State Police Helicopter Crash

Later that afternoon, a Virginia State Police Bell 407 helicopter monitoring the unrest crashed in a wooded residential area in Albemarle County. Lieutenant Pilot Jay Cullen, 48, commander of the state police Aviation Unit, and Trooper-Pilot Berke M. M. Bates, 40, were both killed. The National Transportation Safety Board later determined the crash was likely caused by the pilot’s loss of control, with insufficient recent training for recovery from a rapid descent as a contributing factor.⁷

Life Sentences for James Alex Fields Jr.

Fields faced prosecution in both state and federal court. In December 2018, a Charlottesville jury convicted him of first-degree murder in Heyer’s death, along with multiple counts of aggravated malicious wounding, malicious wounding, and leaving the scene of an accident. The jury recommended life in prison plus 419 years and $480,000 in fines, which Circuit Judge Richard Moore imposed on July 15, 2019.⁸

On March 27, 2019, Fields pleaded guilty in federal court to 29 counts of violating the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Under oath, he admitted the attack was motivated by the race, color, national origin, and religion of his victims, and that he intended to kill those he struck. He also acknowledged his history of promoting white supremacist views and support for Adolf Hitler on social media.⁴ The plea deal took the death penalty off the table. On June 28, 2019, a federal judge sentenced him to life in prison without parole, and U.S. Attorney Thomas Cullen described the attack as “a hate-inspired act of domestic terrorism.”⁵ The state sentence runs consecutively to the federal life term.⁹

Other Criminal Cases from the Rally

The Parking Garage Beating of DeAndre Harris

One of the day’s most widely seen assaults was a group attack on DeAndre Harris, a 20-year-old Black man beaten with metal pipes and wooden boards by six men in a parking garage near the rally. Harris suffered a broken wrist and a head wound requiring staples. Four attackers were identified and prosecuted:¹⁰

Jacob Scott Goodwin was sentenced to eight years in prison in August 2018.
Alex Michael Ramos was sentenced to six years in prison in August 2018.
Richard W. Preston, a Ku Klux Klan leader, was sentenced to four years for firing a gun during the rally.
Daniel Borden entered an Alford plea to malicious wounding and was sentenced in January 2019 to 20 years, with all but roughly four years suspended.

Two of the six men involved were never identified.¹⁰

Christopher Cantwell

Christopher Cantwell, a white nationalist podcast host who became widely known as the “crying Nazi” after a viral video, pleaded guilty to two counts of assault and battery for pepper-spraying counter-protesters. He received a 12-month jail sentence, with most of it suspended after credit for 107 days already served, and was barred from returning to Virginia for five years.¹¹

Torch-March Felony Indictments

Years after the rally, Virginia prosecutors brought felony charges against participants in the August 11 torch march. In February 2023, an Albemarle County grand jury issued indictments under a 2002 state law that makes it a felony to burn an object with the intent to intimidate and cause fear of injury or death. The charge carries up to five years in prison.¹² The first three defendants named were William Zachary Smith of Texas, Tyler Bradley Dykes of South Carolina, and Dallas Medina of Ohio.¹³

By mid-2024, 11 individuals had been charged with “intimidation by fire,” and five had pleaded guilty. Jacob Joseph Dix of Ohio became the first defendant to face trial, but in June 2024 a jury deadlocked after roughly 12 hours of deliberation and the judge declared a mistrial.¹⁴¹⁵

Sines v. Kessler: The Civil Case Against the Organizers

In October 2017, a group of Charlottesville community members — students, a minister, and residents who had been injured or terrorized during the rally — filed a federal civil lawsuit against roughly two dozen white nationalist leaders and organizations. The case, Sines v. Kessler, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia and backed by the nonprofit Integrity First for America. The plaintiffs invoked the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act and Virginia state laws, alleging a coordinated conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence and intimidation.¹⁶

Defendants included Kessler, Spencer, Cantwell, Fields, Matthew Heimbach, Jeff Schoep (former leader of the National Socialist Movement), Nathan Damigo (founder of Identity Evropa), Michael Hill and Michael Tubbs of the League of the South, and several organizations. Seven defendants who refused to cooperate received default judgments. Robert “Azzmador” Ray was found in contempt of court in September 2020, and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest.¹⁶

After a four-week trial that began on October 25, 2021, a jury on November 23, 2021, found all defendants liable for conspiring to commit violence and intimidation, along with assault and battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress.¹⁷ The jury initially awarded $24 million in punitive damages, but the trial court reduced that figure to $350,000 under Virginia’s statutory cap on punitive damages.¹⁸

Both sides appealed. In July 2024, the Fourth Circuit affirmed the finding that all defendants were jointly and severally liable for compensatory damages but ruled that Virginia’s punitive damages cap had to be applied on a per-plaintiff basis rather than as a single aggregate cap. That recalculation reinstated approximately $2.8 million in punitive damages, bringing the total award, including compensatory damages and attorneys’ fees, to more than $9 million.¹⁸¹⁹²⁰

Why the Police Response Failed

In December 2017, former U.S. Attorney Timothy Heaphy released a 220-page independent review of how Charlottesville and Virginia handled the rally. The report’s central conclusion was blunt: the city “protected neither free expression nor public safety.”¹ Among the specific failures identified:

Charlottesville police and Virginia State Police operated on different radio channels and could not communicate with each other.
Commanders instructed officers not to intervene in physical confrontations unless they were the most serious, opting to wait for an unlawful assembly declaration. When the declaration came, the dispersal pushed opposing groups into each other.
An officer stationed at Fourth Street and Market Street was pulled for safety concerns. The intersection was left blocked by nothing more than a wooden sawhorse, and that was the route Fields used to drive into the crowd.
The local Commonwealth’s Attorney incorrectly told police they could not restrict weapons other than firearms, when in fact the city had authority to prohibit bats, poles, and shields.
The City Council was cited for interfering with planning by directing, just days before the rally, that the event be moved to a different park.

The report recommended municipalities adopt a “stadium approach” to large protests, with secure perimeters, designated entry points, and physical separation between opposing groups, along with better de-escalation training and unified command structures.¹ It also revealed that Police Chief Al Thomas had deleted text messages and used a personal email account for police business during the period in question. Roughly two weeks after the report’s release, Thomas retired effective immediately on December 18, 2017. City manager Maurice Jones offered no public reason and praised Thomas as “a man of integrity.”²¹

What Happened to the Lee Statue

The Robert E. Lee statue that sparked the rally was removed from its pedestal on July 10, 2021, after years of legal battles with the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other groups seeking to keep it in place.²² The park where it stood, originally named Lee Park, was renamed Emancipation Park in 2017 and then Market Street Park in 2018.²³

After the final lawsuit challenging the statue’s disposition was resolved in September 2023, the nearly 10,000-pound bronze figure was cut apart and melted down at a foundry. The process is part of a project called “Swords into Plowshares,” led by the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, which aims to recast the bronze into a new, community-chosen public art installation.²⁴ Three finalist design teams (Hood Design, MASS Design Group, and PUSH Studio) are competing for the commission, and the winning design is scheduled to be announced on July 10, 2026, the fifth anniversary of the statue’s removal.²⁵

Remembering Heather Heyer

The section of the downtown street where Heather Heyer was killed has been renamed “Honorary Heather Heyer Way.” Her mother, Susan Bro, co-founded the Heather Heyer Foundation, a nonprofit that awarded scholarships to students pursuing work in social justice. The foundation closed in August 2022 and transferred its remaining assets to the African American Heritage Center at the Jefferson School to support a new center for advocacy.²⁶ The Virginia General Assembly also passed a joint resolution in 2018 celebrating her life and legacy.²⁷ Community members continue to gather each August on Heather Heyer Way to remember the three lives lost. At the eighth anniversary observance on August 12, 2025, organizers reflected on the enduring impact of the rally and ongoing national debates over Confederate memorials.²⁸

1
NPR. Charlottesville Made Major Mistakes in Handling Protest, Review Finds
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NPR. The Charlottesville Rally Five Years Later
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Policing Institute. Charlottesville Critical Incident Review
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U.S. Department of Justice. Ohio Man Sentenced to Life in Prison for Federal Hate Crimes
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NPR. Neo-Nazi Who Killed Charlottesville Protester Is Sentenced to Life in Prison
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BBC News. James Fields Sentenced to Life for Charlottesville Car Attack
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Washington Post. Helicopter Pilot in Fatal Charlottesville Crash Lost Control and Lacked Key Training
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NPR. Virginia Court Sentences Neo-Nazi James Fields Jr. to Life in Prison
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CNN. Charlottesville: James Fields Life Sentence
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New York Times. Daniel Borden Sentenced in DeAndre Harris Charlottesville Beating
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New York Times. Christopher Cantwell, Crying Nazi, Pleads Guilty
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VPM. Trial for Unite the Right Charlottesville Torch Rally
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16
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17
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18
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CourtListener. Sines v. Kessler Docket
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U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Sines v. Schoep and Cantwell, Fourth Circuit Opinion
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NBC News. Charlottesville Police Chief Al Thomas Retires After Criticism Over Rally
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New York Times. Charlottesville Removes Confederate Monuments
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PBS NewsHour. Charlottesville Parks Once Named for Confederate Generals to Change Names Again
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The Guardian. Charlottesville Robert E. Lee Statue Melted Down
25
VPM. Swords Into Plowshares Design Finalists
26
Heather Heyer Foundation. Heather Heyer Foundation
27
Virginia Legislative Information System. House Joint Resolution No. 302
28
WSET. Charlottesville Remembers Eight Years Since the Unite the Right Rally