Two men who attacked a Black man last year in a parking garage in Charlottesville, Virginia received prison sentences by a judge on Thursday.
Alex Michael Ramos and Jacob Scott Goodwin will serve six and eight-year sentences, respectively for brutally beating DeAndre Harris on Aug. 12, 2017, during Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally, which saw White supremacists and protesters clash in the street, according to The Daily Progress.
Harris was chased into the parking garage and beaten with sticks and shields that left a cut on his head that required stitches, other bruises and a broken wrist.
Harris’s assault was captured on video and shows Goodwin hitting him to the ground while other men attacked him. The video also shows Ramos punching him.
Goodwin’s defense team made the argument that he acted out of fear, but Judge Richard E. Moore rejected that notion saying that Goodwin looked like he was prepared for a fight and said that the video was one of the more violent one-sided beatings he had seen.
“You had the appearance of military or riot police,” Moore said, according to The Daily Progress. “You had no rational reason to be afraid.”
On Tuesday, Moore sentenced a Ku Klux Klan leader, Richard Preston, to four years in prison for shooting a gun within 1,000 feet of a school.
He said that the sentences given to Goodwin and Ramos were comparable to Preston’s.
