A small town police department in Texas has refused to back down despite the social media firestorm that resulted from a selfie one of its deputies took with Kyle Rittenhouse.
On Thursday, the Facebook account of the Thrall Police Department in Williamson County, Texas, posted a picture of an unidentified deputy with Kyle Rittenhouse, the 19-year-old who last November, was acquitted of all charges in the shooting deaths of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and the shooting of Gaige Grosskreutz during the Kenosha riots of 2020.
The initial Facebook post featured a picture of Rittenhouse with the officer and read: “Make those stops, you never know who you might meet. Today it was Kyle Rittenhouse, welcome to Texas.”
A swarm of critical comments then ensued. However, rather than back down and cater to the mob’s outrage, the police department doubled down and added the following message to the original post: “I must have missed something, I believed that this young man was arrested, charged, indicted and then found not guilty by a jury of his peers. Is this not how our country works anymore? The hate in these comments is terrible, if you have information that is contrary to that I would honestly love to hear it.”
The post remains active and has garnered over 12k likes, 1.8k shares, and 1.7k comments as of Monday afternoon.
Rittenhouse was just 17 when he travelled from Illinois to Kenosha to protect area businesses which had been looted and damaged during the riots that came in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Officer Rusten Sheskey shot Blake, who is black, during a domestic dispute in the summer of 2020. Blake admitted he had a knife in his possession at the time of the incident.
Fox Business reported that the riots that occurred as a result of the shooting caused an estimated $50 million in property damages in the Kenosha area.
It is unclear how the unnamed Thrall deputy and Rittenhouse met. Rittenhouse is allegedly studying at Blinn College, a junior college outside of Austin. He may also have aspirations of transferring to Texas A&M some day. He had plans to study nursing at Arizona State University, but reconsidered after his trial.