A North Dakota teenage was killed in an apparently politically motivated attack. Grand Forks Herald. 18 year old Cayler Ellingson was hit by a car allegedly driven by 41 year old Shannon Brandt in McHenry. Ellingson was calling for his mother to pick him up because he claimed that he was being chased by Brant, but he was dead by the time his mother was on the scene. Brandt called 911 to report the crime and told the dispatcher that he thought Ellingson was a member of a "Republican extremism group" and was "sending people to get him" after a political argument. Brandt was drunk at the time and faces a minimum of 10 years in prison due to a previous conviction of DUI and a maximum sentence of 20 years for vehicular homicide. Brandt is being held on $50,000 bail, which he objected to. Further charges may be filed.
My Comment:
This story is making the rounds on conservative media and I decided to cover it because it reminds me of a local case we had here in Wisconsin. Back in 2020 a Hispanic man ran over a man riding a motorcycle for no other reason than he was white. That incident happened only a few miles away from my Mom's house so I took it fairly seriously at the time. The attacker in that case ended up in an asylum after his conviction this year.
This case seems similar. The attacker in this case appears to have killed someone because he disagreed with him politically and did it by running him down with a car. There are differences of course, the attack was not random and was after a disagreement, but it did remind me of the cases.
There is no question of justification in this case. It is possible that Brandt felt threatened during the argument, but Ellingson was walking away. He had abandoned the conflict and was trying to get home with his mother. Even if Brandt was telling the truth about Ellingson saying he was going to send people to "get" him, there was no immediate threat to Brandt whatsoever. Plus, in most cases running people over with a car is not self defense in the vast majority of cases. Unless there is some information we don't know about, I can't see how Brandt doesn't end up convicted.
I also don't understand what Brandt meant by a "Republican extremist group". I sincerely doubt an 18 year old kid that was coming back from a street dance was some kind of far right extremist. But even if he was, that doesn't excuse this attack in any way.
My guess is that Ellingson and Brandt had words and Brandt couldn't handle that some kid didn't agree with him. That made him angry so he decided to kill him. The political stuff was probably just the context, if Ellingson had disagreed with him about anything else, the drunk Brandt probably would have done the same thing.
Still, given the political context, it's hard not to wonder if this was inspired by the rhetoric coming out of the Biden White House. After all it's only been a few weeks since Biden's crazy speech where he denounced half the county as political extremists, maybe Brand took it to heart? Political tensions are high and I don't see it going down anytime soon.
What would help is if the people on the left would denounce this attack. Unfortunately, outside of conservative and local media the story is largely being ignored. Of course, I don't have to speculate how this would go if the political affiliation was reversed. When Heather Heyer died in Charlottesville it was national news for weeks and served as a center peace of Biden's campaign. But this story, as of this writing, hasn't even rated a tweet from most major news outlets...
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