LOS ANGELES—Dozens of protesters who heard about a planned Ku Klux Klan rally were waiting by a Southern California park when six people pulled up in a black SUV. They were dressed in black shirts decorated with the Klan cross and Confederate flag patches and took out signs that read “White Lives Matter.”
Witness video show the Klansmen were quickly surrounded Saturday afternoon by the counter-protesters who shouted at them. Someone smashed the SUV’s window. One KKK member stabbed a counter-protester with the decorative end of a flag pole, setting off a vicious brawl where three people were stabbed, one critically, and two were assaulted.
“I got stabbed,” a man is then heard screaming, lifting his T-shirt to show a wound to his stomach. A fire hydrant where the man briefly sat was covered in blood.
One police sergeant saw another Klan member with a knife in his hand and a counter-protester bleeding nearby, Anaheim Police Sgt. Daron Wyatt said. The sergeant took the KKK member into custody. Meanwhile, counter-protesters stomped on two KKK members, he said.
“All hell broke loose,” said Brian Levin, director of California State University, San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, who witnessed the violence. “I thought they were going to stomp these Klansmen to death.”
