A former spokesperson for Kyle Rittenhouse says he became disillusioned with his ex-client after learning that he had sent text messages pledging to “fucking murder” shoplifters outside a pharmacy before later shooting two people to death during racial justice protests in Wisconsin in 2020.
Dave Hancock made that remark about Rittenhouse – for whom he also worked as a security guard – on a Law & Crime documentary that premiered on Friday. The show explored the unsuccessful criminal prosecution of Rittenhouse, who killed Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
As Hancock told it on The Trials of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 90-minute film’s main subject had “a history of things he was doing prior to [the double slaying], specifically patrolling the street for months with guns and borrowing people’s security uniforms, doing whatever he could to try to get into some kind of a fight”.
Hancock nonetheless said he initially believed Rittenhouse’s claims of self-defense when he first relayed his story about fatally shooting Rosenbaum and Huber. Yet that changed when he later became aware of text messages that surfaced as part of a civil lawsuit filed by the family of one of the men slain in Kenosha demanding wrongful death damages from Rittenhouse.
Rittenhouse sent the texts from the phone he had the night of the 25 August double slaying in Kenosha, according to what Hancock says in the new film. The texts were in response to seeing shoplifters at a CVS pharmacy on 10 August, a little more than two weeks before the deadly shooting in Kenosha.
“The world is disgusting,” read one of the texts, as shown in a preview of The Trials of Kyle Rittenhouse provided to the Guardian. Another said: “It makes me [fucking] sick.
Others read: “I wish they would come into my house.”
“I will fucking murder them.”
Commenting on the texts while speaking to Law & Crime’s chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross, Hancock said: “This is where his head’s at – you know what I mean?”
He also said: “My first impression was a scared kid, arrogant, oblivious to the world around him. When he was telling me about the story, I believed he was being sincere.
“I believed things he told me that I now understand to be one of his many lies. And that hurts. That sucks.”
About two weeks later, Rittenhouse – then 17 – traveled 20 miles from his home in Antioch, Illinois, to Kenosha as protests erupted after a white police officer shot Jacob Blake, who is Black. Blake’s shooting was about three months after a white Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, who is Black, in plain view of a cellphone recording video.
While he roamed Kenosha’s streets with other armed men who appointed themselves as security guards, Rittenhouse used a rifle to fatally shoot Rosenbaum, 36, and Huber, 26. He also wounded a third man and was charged with five felonies, including first-degree intentional homicide.
Rittenhouse maintained to the jury seated for his criminal trial that he carried out the shootings in self-defense and was justified in his actions. Jurors ultimately found Rittenhouse not guilty of all charges against him in November 2021, with far-right politicians and pundits hailing the verdict as an important legal victory and civil rights activists decrying the outcome.
The wrongful death lawsuit against Rittenhouse remains pending.
Hancock served as Rittenhouse’s spokesperson and security guard beyond the criminal acquittal.
Shortly after the verdict was read, Hancock spoke at length with news media reporters, saying: “You are going to see some good things out of Kyle coming up, because he is very pragmatic about what has happened.”
Hancock also was involved in efforts to publicize a book by Rittenhouse, characterizing the volume as “a story of a young man’s very unorthodox journey into adulthood, what it took to make it and the lessons he learned along the way”.
Yet Hancock had moved on from those positions by the time The Trials of Kyle Rittenhouse debuted.
Rittenhouse’s book reportedly bombed on Amazon’s Kindle platform. More recently, the self-styled gun rights activist announced he would not be supporting Donald Trump in November’s White House election before vitriol on social media successfully put pressure on him into endorsing the former president.
The Trials of Kyle Rittenhouse is scheduled for rebroadcast on Sunday at 8pm ET on Law & Crime, which airs on basic cable packages and streaming services such as YouTube TV and Peacock. It is also available on demand, a network spokesperson said.
