Waukesha Holiday Parade Killer Promoted Violence Against White People On Social Media

Brooks killed six people and injured 62 others when he drove his Ford Escape into the Christmas parade and the surrounding crowd at Sunday’s parade. He is charged with five counts of first degree intentional homicide, which carry possible life sentences, and Waukesha District Attorney Susan Opper intends to file a sixth count. His bond was set at $5 million dollars, as requested by Opper due to Brooks’ criminal record and the severity of the charges.

Brooks has had at least 12 convictions since 1999, and he has arrest records in Wisconsin, Nevada, and Georgia. Currently, there’s a warrant for his arrest in Nevada for “failing to comply with sex offender registry requirements.” Furthermore, Brooks was recently bailed out of jail for a November 2 incident, which included him after running over a woman he had a child with. He paid his $1,000 cash bond after being charged with battery, disorderly conduct, bail jumping, and resisting an officer in Milwaukee County. 

"There are not words to describe the risk that this defendant presents to our community," Opper said.

The Waukesha Holiday Parade Massacre

Shortly after 4:30pm on Sunday, November 21, Brooks drove his SUV into the Waukesha Holiday parade and the crowd that had gathered to watch. Officers say Brooks had been involved in a domestic disturbance elsewhere before the parade massacre. 

According to a criminal complaint filed Tuesday, November 23, multiple police officers tried to stop Brooks multiple times. One detective blocked the car from the front, yelling at Brooks to stop and banging on the hood. When Brooks continued driving, he pounded on the driver’s window and door, shouting at him to stop. Brooks only drove faster into the parade, and the officer pursued him.

A second officer saw the SUV and also tried to stop Brooks, holding up his hands and yelling “stop the vehicle.” However, Brooks looked directly at the officer, with “no emotion on his face,” and continued forward. 

Both officers and witnesses have stated that Brooks drove in a zigzag manner to hit as many people as possible.

"The nature of this offense is shocking," said Court Commissioner Kevin Costello. "The detail I was not expecting here today – that two detectives, not lay people, detectives – not only tried to stop this, but rendered an opinion that this was an intentional act. I've not seen anything like this in my very long career."

What Was Brooks’ Motive?

So what motivated Darrell Brooks to drive his car into a crowd, injuring and killing the elderly and children?

Brooks’ now-deleted Facebook account suggests that his support of the Black Lives Matter movement could have motivated his behavior – all six of his deceased victims were white. Brooks had encouraged knocking “white ppl [the f**k] out.”

In a post from June 9, 2020, Brooks wrote, “LEARNED ND TAUGHT BEHAVIOR!! so when we start bakk knokkin white people TF out ion wanna hear it...the old white ppl 2, KNOKK DEM TF OUT!! PERIOD..” followed by a middle finger and expletive emoji.  

He shared multiple articles and memes about race and white privilege in June 2020. Brooks was also a supporter of the Black Hebrew Israelites, a group that believes African Americans are the real descendants of the Biblical Israelites. 

Brooks shared a meme about Hitler that claimed negros are “the true Hebrews” and that America had moved “false white Jews into a state of Israel,” captioning the meme “#research” and “real game rite here.”

Other social media posts attacked law enforcement, comparing the police to the Ku Klux Klan and labeling them “violent street gangs.” He also called for violence against white people. 

According to the Daily Mail UK, Brooks posted on Saturday that he was "not surprised" by the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, but authorities haven't confirmed a connection between the verdict and the attack.

Brooks, who was an amateur rapper by the name MathBoi Fly, also sang lyrics that he was a “terrorist” and a “killer in the city.”

Brooks' social media history, coupled with his crimes, have led many to consider the parade massacre as more than just a simple evasion from police.

Mainstream Media Seemingly Fails To Accurately Report 

Mainstream media outlets have referred to the massacre as a "crash" or an “accident,” rather than as an intentional attack or even with the neutral term “incident.”

The caption of a YouTube video from NBC News that shows Brooks’ arrest outside a home is captioned: “Video captured by a Ring camera appears to show Darrell Edward Brooks in front of a home before being arrested in connection to the Waukesha parade accident.” (emphasis added). It was uploaded yesterday, November 23.

NBC’s MSNBC also featured paid analyst Clint Watts, who also referred to the massacre as an “accident” the day after it happened. 

Others have asserted that Brooks was being chased by police, which is what pushed him to drive into the parade. However, the police chief said that Brooks "was not being chased by police at the time of the crash." (emphasis added)

The Daily Beast put out an article yesterday implying that Brooks’ tie to BLM was basically a right-wing conspiracy theory, and dedicated the majority of the article to nitpicking Andy Ngo’s Twitter reporting on the Waukesha tragedy and Brooks’ motivations. However, they did have to concede, “It’s not that any of the information Ngo strung together about Brooks appears to be wrong."

The article continues, "But it is framed in bad faith to lead a casual reader to the entirely unfounded conclusion that this was a racial attack of some sort. Scroll through the Waukesha trending topic on Twitter and it’s packed with culture warriors howling in outrage about BLM.”

It's not unreasonable to assert that if a white man had driven into a crowd of black people, it would immediately be labeled as an attack motivated by racism, not an "accident."

The Victims

The six victims killed have been identified as:

• Virginia Sorenson, 79

• Leanna Owen, 71

• Tamara Durand, 52

• Jane Kulich, 52

• Wilhelm Hospel, 81

• Jackson Sparks, 8

The cause of death for five of the six victims was determined to be multiple blunt force injuries. The sixth hasn’t been announced yet.

Darrell Brooks will be back in court on January 14 for a preliminary hearing.