Democrat State Senator Tim Carpenter, 60, COLLAPSES unconscious after 10 protesters ‘punch and kick him in the head’
A WISCONSIN state senator was brutally attacked by protesters outside of the State Capitol building on Tuesday night — and was left with a bruised body and possibly a concussion.
Tim Carpenter, a 60-year-old Democratic state senator, said he was assaulted after he took a cellphone video of protesters during a night of violent demonstrations.
Per a video he posted on Twitter on Wednesday, Carpenter appeared to be filming protesters who suddenly run up to him and demand he stop recording.
“I took this pic- it got me assaulted & beat up. Punched/kicked in the head, neck, ribs. Maybe concussion, socked in left eye is little blurry, sore neck & ribs,” the official tweeted.
“8-10 people attacked me. Innocent people are going to get killed. Capitol locked- stuck in office. Stop violence now [please]!”
In another tweet, he referred to those who attacked him as “a mob” and said he also as a swollen cheek.
“This has to stop before some innocent person get killed. I locked up in the Capitol until it’s safe,” he added.
Carpenter appeared to collapse into unconsciousness after the assault.
Reporter Lance Veeser, with WKOW, tweeted a photo of him alongside a tweet that read: “Minutes earlier he told us the protesters assaulted him. Then he collapsed walking towards the Capitol. We called paramedics. An ambulance is here now.”
The state senator told a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter: “I don’t know what happened … all I did was stop and take a picture … and the next thing I’m getting five-six punches, getting kicked in the head.”
Democratic Governor Tony Evers said he was prepared to send in the National Guard after the violence on Tuesday night.
Aside from attacking the state senator, a group of roughly 200 to 300 protesters also tore down statues that honored an abolitionist and women’s rights, and also threw a Molotov cocktail into a government building.
Demonstrations broke out after a Black man was arrested earlier on Tuesday for bringing a megaphone and baseball bat into a nearby restaurant.
His arrest and the subsequent violent demonstrations followed weeks of mostly peaceful protests following the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by white former cop Derek Chauvin on May 25.
“What happened in Madison last night presented a stark contrast from the peaceful protests we have seen across our state in recent weeks, including significant damage to state property,” Evers said in a statement.
Two statues wore torn down, one of which was Colonel Hands Christian Heg, according to the Journal Sentinel.
Heg was an anti-slavery activist who fought alongside Union soldiers during the Civil War — but despite this, his statue was decapitated and thrown into a lake on Tuesday.
A “Forward” statue — a replica of the first, which had been located in front of the Wisconsin State Capitol since the 1990s — was also torn down.
The statue is “an allegory of devotion and progress,” per the Wisconsin Historical Society.
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Protester Micah Le told The Associated Press the fall of the statues “is a huge gain for the movement, though I think that liberal and conservative media outlets will try to represent last night as senseless violence rather than the strategic political move it really was.”
Le said the two statues paint a picture of Wisconsin as a racially progressive state even though slavery has continued in the form of a corrections system built around incarcerating Blacks.
The violence drew outrage from both Republicans and Democrats, but Republicans called on Evers and Madison’s Democratic mayor to do more to protect the Capitol.