A Baltimore man who took part in the white supremacist rally earlier this month in Charlottesville, Virginia, was arrested and charged on Aug. 26 with discharging a firearm within 1,000 feet of a school.
Richard Wilson Preston, 52, was said to have fired the gun in the 100 block of West Market Street — which is near Emancipation Park, where the rally took place — The Baltimore Sun reported.
[Read more: Maryland removes statue honoring Roger B. Taney from State House grounds overnight]
A video released by the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia was handed over to the FBI on Aug. 17 and to local and state police a few days later, leading to his identification and arrest, The Sun reported. In the video, Preston can be seen and heard yelling racial slurs and then firing a gun into the opposing crowd.
Preston, who faces a possible felony conviction and sentence of two to 10 years in prison, waived his right to challenge extradition at an Aug. 29 hearing at the Baltimore County Detention Center, where he is currently being held. It is unclear when he will be transferred to Virginia.
Preston is said to be an imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan Maryland chapter, while he has previously identified himself as an imperial wizard of the Baltimore-area Confederate White Kings, The Sun reported.
[Read more: President Loh speaks out against “supremacist ideology” of Charlottesville protesters]
In an interview with The Guardian in October 2013, Preston claimed he had broken away from the state’s KKK chapter to form the smaller organization in order to “dissociate himself from white supremacy and neo-Nazism,” instead focusing on undocumented immigrants and ousting then-President Barack Obama from office.
“We are not claiming to be supreme. We are not supremacists; we are white separatists,” Preston told The Guardian.
One of Preston’s neighbors, who remained anonymous, told WBAL that Preston carried Confederate flags on his trucks, which he took down after the Charlottesville rally, and that he kept laughing when an FBI SWAT team arrested him Saturday morning.
During the “Unite The Right” rally on Aug. 12, which began after white supremacists protested the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, one woman was killed and 19 were injured after a car plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters.
The event has spurred cities nationwide, including those in Kentucky, Florida and New York, to remove similar Confederate statues. In Maryland, all four of Baltimore’s Confederate statues were removed, along with a statue honoring former Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney outside of the State House in Annapolis.
