Jacob Blake, the black man who was shot seven times by a Kenosha police officer, said he believed he was going to die and shared what he thought was his final words with his children after the August shooting.
Blake, 29, was partially paralyzed in the August 23 shooting that sparked days of protests and unrest in Wisconsin and elsewhere.
“I kind of went limp,” Blake told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in an interview that airs Thursday. “And all I remember at that moment was kind of leaning back, looking at my kids. I said, ‘Daddy loves you, no matter what.'”
“I thought it would be the last thing – I thought it would be the last thing I would say to them,” he said. “Thank God it wasn’t.”
The interview comes a week after Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley announced that no police would be charged with the shooting.
Blake was shot seven times by police officer Rusten Sheskey of Kenosha. It turned out that some of these photos came from the back.
Sheskey was responding to a domestic disorder call at the time and police were informed that Blake had an arrest warrant, officials said. Blake resisted the prison armed with a knife and refused orders to drop it, the prosecutor said.
Blake was shot after driving to a “disputed car” that had at least one child, Graveley said. He said Blake admitted to investigators that he had a knife, but he was not sure if he had opened it.
Graveley said that Sheskey and other officials would have a strong case of self-defense, and that “if you don’t believe you can prove a case beyond any reasonable doubt, you have an ethical obligation not to issue charges.”
The shooting was captured on video and sparked protests over the summer, which at times became violent, as protesters demanded racial justice and police reform.
Amid protests in Kenosha, Kyle Rittenhouse, now 18, who had gone to Kenosha from Antioch, Illinois, allegedly shot and killed two men. Rittenhouse was criminally charged and his lawyers alleged that he acted in self-defense.
Blake’s shooting occurred after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police in May and Breonna Taylor’s fatal shooting in Louisville in March.
