A Kenosha, Wisconsin, parks panel set aside a proposal for a memorial to the man who was killed during the city’s riots almost two years ago, but one activist suspects the idea is still alive.
The five-member Kenosha Parks Commission in the city south of Milwaukee decided Monday not to follow through on the proposal to dedicate a memorial tree and plaque to Anthony Huber, the man who attacked then 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse during a Black Lives Matter riot on Aug. 25, 2020.
Huber’s girlfriend, Illinois resident Hannah Gittings, had filed the proposal with the commission asking for the memorial marker to be placed in the skateboard-wielding attacker’s name in Anderson Park, Fox News Digital reported.
News of the proposal was first brought before the public by Kevin Mathewson, a former Kenosha alderman turned independent journalist, who noticed that the proposal had been placed on the commission’s agenda for Monday.
“The career violent criminal and felon, Anthony Huber might have a memorial tree planted and plaque installed at Kenosha’s Anderson Park,” Mathewson wrote on his website Kenosha County Eye.
Mathewson described Huber’s criminal history and noted that Rittenhouse only acted when he had no choice.
“We’ve all seen the photos and videos,” Mathewson wrote of the riot. “While Kyle was running towards police, violent protesters attacked. One man drop-kicked Kyle. Huber struck Kyle in his head with a skateboard. Anthony Huber lived a life of severe violence and crime. He was given several chances in life to change course. With his most serious conviction, the Judge showed him some undeserved mercy and sentenced him to probation. He later had his probation revoked and went to prison for new crimes.”
Mathewson added that Huber was arrested after threatening to “gut” his brother “like a pig” with a 6-inch butcher knife in 2012.
During the 2021 trial, Corey Chirafisi, an attorney for Rittenhouse, revealed what Huber did that day in 2012.
“[Anthony] Huber told his brother that if he didn’t start cleaning a room in his house he was going to gut him like a pig,” Chirafisi told the court, noting that this was said while Huber held a butcher knife to the brother’s stomach.
“Huber grabbed his brother by the neck, dug his nails in and choked him for approximately 10 seconds,” Chirafisi added. “He put a knife to his brother’s left ear and his brother felt it cut.”
“‘I’m going to burn the house down with all you f***ers in it,” the attorney quoted Huber as saying before he was charged with strangulation, the New York Post reported.
Matthewson went on to list half a dozen of Huber’s arrests for violence between 2012 and 2017.
After Matthewson wrote of the coming proposal, several citizens turned out to the meeting to convince the commissioners to deny the request for the memorial.
Video of the pertinent segment of the meeting is below, with a number of speakers opposed to the idea.
“I ask the board to deny this motion,” one man said at about the 16-minute mark. “Is this the type of character of a person we want to memorialize? Who engages in violent acts?”
About the 21-minute mark, it shows Alderman Eric Haugaard, chairman of the commission, saying that he favored tabling the proposal due to ongoing litigation related to the shootings.
Matthewson, who also attended the meeting, then spoke out to accuse the members of the commission of deciding outside the public eye to table the motion, violating the Wisconsin open meetings law, according to Fox News Digital.
As Haugaard banged the gavel to silence Matthewson, Matthewson told Haugaard he could slam the gavel “like a lunatic,” but it “doesn’t change what you did was wrong.”
Speaking to Fox News Digital, Matthewson blasted the members of the commission, saying, “They have all spoken publicly against Kyle Rittenhouse. They think that he shouldn’t have been out there, and it was terrible that he shot these poor innocent people who are just protesting police brutality.”
Mathewson went on to say that the “toe-the-line, card-carrying Democrats” on the commission would have passed the proposal if people had not turned out to oppose the issue.
“I think those five members want the tree and the plaque to go up, but they don’t want the ramifications from the voters,” he said.
Mathewson also worried that since the proposal was only tabled and not eliminated, the commission will simply bring it up later and pass it when no one is looking.
“That’s happened before many times with a variety of things in the city of Kenosha and probably every city around the country,” he said. “It’s just a trick. It’s politicking.”
On his site, Mathewson wrote, “A room full of tax-payers spoke against the measure including emails read into the record. Not a single person was in favor of the proposal. The speakers made it clear – they wanted the proposal voted down, not delayed.”
“It’s unprecedented, what happened to our city a couple of summers ago. And to memorialize a man who lived a life of violence and crime, and who was one of the ones contributing to the rioting and looting, is just unfathomable. It was offensive to the city of Kenosha taxpayers even to consider it, in my opinion,” Mathewson told Fox.
Some may buy the progressive line that Kyle Rittenhouse is the evil that emerged from the 2020 Kenosha riot.
But it appears that many of the people of Kenosha don’t want to memorialize a violent thug and the left-wing mob who tried to kill a teenager.