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Prosecutors have charged four men in connection with a shooting at a Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis last week.
Allen Lawrence Scarsella, the 22-year-old who allegedly fired the shots, was charged with one count of rioting while armed with a dangerous weapon and five counts of assault with a dangerous weapon. Twenty-seven-year-old Joseph Martin Backman, 21-year-old Nathan Wayne Gustavsson and 26-year-old Daniel Thomas Macey each face a single riot charge.
Scarsella, Backman and Gustavsson, who are all white, and Macey, who is Asian, were arrested last Wednesday. Minneapolis police are working with the FBI on the case and said they are not seeking any more suspects.
The shooting occurred at a protest in which Black Lives Matter’s Minneapolis chapter was demanding justice in the death of Jamar Clark, a 24-year-old black man shot by police this month.
One of the arrested men called a high-school friend, who is a police officer, and confessed the crime, according to a search warrant obtained by CBS Minnesota. The man claims he and his friends went to the protest with the intention of live-streaming it, and said the altercation began when protesters tried to get them to leave.
But Oleuchi Omeoga, a protester who witnessed the shooting, told the Associated Press that the three men were masked and “weren’t supposed to be” at the demonstration. Once the men left, several protesters followed them to a street corner. That’s when the shots were fired, according to Omeoga. The shots hit five black men, none of whom sustained life-threatening injuries.
