Armed Protester Killed in Austin

A Texas protester was shot dead Saturday night after a car drove into the crowd and the driver apparently opened fire on him, the Austin American-Statesman reports. Garrett Foster, 28, was approaching the stopped vehicle with other Black Lives Matter activists when he was killed. Foster was also armed—with an AK-47, per the New York Times—which witnesses said he had pointed at the ground. The driver sped away and may have been shot at by someone in the crowd. Police soon tracked down the vehicle and arrested the suspect, who is cooperating. "I mean if I used it against the cops, I'm dead," Foster said of his gun before the shooting. "And I think all of the people that hate us and want to say [expletive] to us are too big of a pussies [sic] to stop and do anything about it."

Asked why he was armed, Foster said his roommate "got arrested, and they stopped letting us march anywhere, so I started carrying." The Times notes that Texas gun laws are liberal enough to allow gun-rights supporters to carry rifles at protests, and activists on the left and right are known to do it. Foster was pushing his fiancee—Whitney Mitchell, a quadruple amputee—in a wheelchair at the time the car bore down on the crowd. Foster, who has served in the military, was white, while Mitchell is Black. "He was doing it because he feels really strongly about justice and he’s very heavily against police brutality, and he wanted to support his fiancee," says Foster's mother, Sheila Foster. A GoFundMe page to help the Fosters has already raised over $72,000. (More Black Lives Matter stories.)