Protester Seriously Hurt In Portsmouth, Virginia, As Confederate Statue Is Torn Down Into Crowd Of People

A protester in Portsmouth, Virginia, was seriously injured after a Confederate statue was torn down into a crowd of people, a report claims.

The incident happened on Wednesday night as demonstrators gathered around a Confederate monument in the city and aimed to tear it down. Video from the scene showed protesters tying ropes around the monument and chipping away at it with hammers and other tools. As 13News Now reported, they had already cut the heads off the statues of four soldiers surrounding a larger monument, with a celebratory mood in the crowd and live music playing.

But just after 9 p.m., the mood suddenly shifted when one of the statues was torn down and fell into the crowd, reportedly striking a protester. The report noted that a man who was hit with the statue appeared to be seriously injured.

13News Now went on to say that police, who until that point had not been interfering with the protesters, secured the area with crime scene tape and asked the remaining protesters to go home. The injured man, who had not been identified, was carried away on a stretcher.

Video from the scene showed people kneeling in prayer before leaving the park.

HAPPENING NOW: Protestors are kneeling in prayer at the Confederate statue in Portsmouth. A man with a speaker says they will pray and leave. This is several minutes after someone was injured taking down parts of the monument. #13NewsNow pic.twitter.com/TeOZ7j18D9

— Allison Bazzle 13News Now (@13AllisonBazzle) June 11, 2020

Local leaders in Portsmouth were already planning to hold a hearing on July 28 about whether the monument would remain up, but people reportedly came to Wednesday’s demonstration with the aim of taking it down.

Protesters in a number of other southern cities have taken aim at Confederate statues, defacing them and tearing some down during larger protests after the death of George Floyd. Many have said the statues are a symbol of white supremacy, noting that many were erected during the Jim Crow era and during the Civil Rights movement.

As The Inquisitr wrote, protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, tore down a statue of a former Confederate soldier who became a founding father of the city. The Associated Press reported that many of the statues targeted during the last two weeks of protests had already been slated to come down or were targets for campaigns to take them down.

“As tense protests swelled across the country Saturday into Sunday morning, monuments in Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Mississippi were defaced,” the report noted. “The presence of Confederate monuments across the South — and elsewhere in the United States — has been challenged for years, and some of the monuments targeted were already under consideration for removal.”

Authorities in Portsmouth have not yet given an update on the protester hurt by the falling statue.