Update, August 21, 2019: Burlington police arrested Schenk on Tuesday night.
A Vermont man who once left Ku Klux Klan recruitment flyers at the homes of two women of color is now wanted by Burlington police for a Monday morning assault at the downtown transit center.
William D. Schenk, 25, allegedly attacked a 33-year-old man at the bus station just before 11 a.m. Video of the incident shows the victim looking at his phone before a man starts talking to him. The man, allegedly Schenk, takes off his backpack and begins to physically fight the victim, throwing several punches as at least one bystander tries to break it up.
Burlington cops said the two men knew each other.
“The suspect also struck the victim with an object believed to be a small glass pipe, causing a laceration to the victim’s head,” cops wrote in a press release. “He then fled the scene.”
The victim was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Cops had yet to find Schenk, who, they noted, “has a significant history of law-enforcement contacts.” Among those was his 2015 arrest for disorderly conduct after he left flyers that read “Join the Klan and save our land” on the doorsteps of an African American woman and another woman who identifies as Mexican.
In April 2016, Schenk pleaded no contest to two misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and was sentenced to four months in prison. He later appealed the case to the Vermont Supreme Court, which overturned the conviction by a 3-2 decision in May 2018.
“The flyer is a recruitment solicitation — its overt message is to join the Ku Klux Klan,” former associate justice John Dooley wrote in the ruling. “It contains no explicit statement of threat. To the extent that it conveys a message of personal threat to the recipient, it is that the Klan will recruit members and inflict harm in the future.”
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Bravo Burlington…Go to the bust stop get beaten up by the KKK, Go to the park get stabbed by some homeless transient, go to the bar get your butt kicked by a cop, defend yourself and end up in a cell handcuffed and beaten. Bravo Burlington
This is the same guy that tried to attack me with a hammer at work. I was lucky enough that a coworker saw him walking up behind me with it while I was walking the other way with my back to him. My coworker most likely saved my life by grabbing this man and preventing g him from hitting me in the back of the head with a hammer. He is mentally ill and very unstable and dangerous.
Yes right wing violence is on the rise in the US. Yes it must be addressed. Yes it is in part due to tRumpism, as tRump encourages right wing violence in his speeches and tweets, and yes this is nazism.
Hopefully the piece of sh1t is off the streets this time. Burlington doesn’t typically like to do punishment, though.
Hopefully when trump gets out of office things will turn around!
How about some empathy and compassion? Instead of cops and courts, let’s deal with this the Burlington way – by heavily subsidizing a network of support services for victims of right-wing talk radio hosts and racist ideologues. I know, the guy seems very dangerous and might be mentally ill, but we should open our hearts (and wallets) with the understanding that it isn’t his fault – he needs help and support, not punishment and ostracism.
Maybe the best idea would be harm reduction by creating a “nazi flyer exchange clinic”, where racists can come to engage their ideas judgement-free, under the supervision of trained staff, instead of forcing them to keep it on the street, where they’re vulnerable to people who don’t share their noxious views, where prohibition forces them into crime (making them subject to police violence), and so on…
Sugar coat if you like, but the most vulnerable are also the most violent.
Despite what the progressives might say, coddling criminals is not the right approach.
Sounds like he’d make excellent Trump cabinet material .