Kyle Rittenhouse and his mother fixated on social media comments about them in the hours after he fatally shot two men, and the teen immediately asked for a lawyer when he sat down with detectives, according to video released Monday.
The nearly four hours of footage was captured at the Antioch police station, the far north suburban department where Rittenhouse turned himself in following the shootings during Kenosha protests in late August. Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, died from their injuries, while Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, suffered a gunshot wound to his arm.
Rittenhouse sobs, hyperventilates and bemoans his fate during the police recording, which offers a new glimpse of the teen before he was publicly embraced by far-right groups and gun rights advocates whose donations helped him get out of jail. The image stands in stark contrast to the smiling, defiant Rittenhouse who wore a T-shirt with the phrase “Free as (expletive)” and flashed hand signs appropriated by white supremacist groups while at a southeast Wisconsin bar with his mother after a court hearing this month.
On Friday, a Kenosha County judge barred Rittenhouse from associating with known white supremacists as part of revised bail conditions. He also prohibited Rittenhouse from possessing and consuming alcohol and from having firearms while awaiting trial. Rittenhouse’s lawyers have said he has no ties to extremist groups.
The Tribune received the recording Monday under a Freedom of Information Act request that Antioch officials initially denied four months ago.
The video, recorded hours after the Aug. 25 shootings, begins with Kenosha investigators reminding Rittenhouse of his right to remain silent. Rittenhouse, who idolized police and had participated in groups for aspiring cops, told officers, “I know Miranda.”
Rittenhouse said he wanted a lawyer but would answer questions until the attorney could arrive. The detectives and his mother explained that’s not how the legal system works, bringing the conversation to an abrupt end.
As Rittenhouse slumped in his chair and buried his head in his arms, Wendy Rittenhouse insisted he needed a lawyer because of things she had read on social media. Her son cut her off as she spoke.
“Can you stop talking, Mom?” he asked.
Police then walked out of the interrogation room, leaving the then-17-year-old and his mother alone. Over the next several hours, Wendy Rittenhouse scrolled through her phone, Kyle Rittenhouse thumbed through an FBI memoir and they each attempted, often unsuccessfully, to calm the other.
At one point, she tells him that authorities are trying to contact his father. During the conversation, Wendy Rittenhouse and her son tell each other “you’re a train wreck.”
At another point, Wendy Rittenhouse put her head in her hands.
“What’s wrong?” Kyle asked.
“F—— dumb f—— on Facebook,” she responded quietly. “… They’re saying you’re a piece of s— and I’m a piece of s— mother. But it’s just f—— words.”
A few minutes later, Kyle asked his mother for a pen and paper, so he could write down his Snapchat login information.
“And everything else,” his mother responded. “… You have to deactivate it.”
“I have to get rid of social media?” he asked.
“Yep,” she replied. “… ‘Cause they’re going to harass you if they can find you anywhere.”
Rittenhouse told his mother that he couldn’t give her access to some accounts because the passwords were stored in his phone, which police had confiscated. Before being taken into custody, Rittenhouse had a request for Kenosha detectives.
“Can you guys delete my social media accounts?” he asked. “Like, after you guys get a warrant to go through all my (expletive), can you make sure everything like my social media is deleted?”
The officer responded that he couldn’t discuss the case, but that he would look into it.
In the audible portions of the recording, Rittenhouse does not ask about the men he shot. He also appeared to not understand the serious consequences he faced, as he asked an officer if he could go home and, later, asked about getting counseling to help him deal with the situation.
“I have a question,” he told an officer. “Is there any way I can talk to a counselor or somebody … about what happened?”
The officer responded, “absolutely,” but was noncommittal about when such a meeting could happen.
For some of the exchange, Rittenhouse’s responses are too muffled to understand, but he conveys that the shooting had been traumatic for him.
“Your life has been altered,” the officer said. “This is something that you’re going to have to cope with the rest of your life.”
Rittenhouse nodded.
“I don’t want to be one of those people that lives with PTSD the rest of their life,” he said.
After the two exchanged a few more words, the officer closed the door and left Rittenhouse alone, sipping his coffee.
Given that Rittenhouse did not answer the detectives’ questions, prosecutors likely will rely heavily on the statements he made to Antioch police when he and his mother arrived at the station a few hours earlier. During his conversation with local authorities as they waited for Kenosha detectives to arrive, Rittenhouse acknowledged shooting two people and worried about what people were saying on social media, records show.
According to 17 pages of police reports released in late October, Rittenhouse told police he had been hired to protect a Kenosha business amid the unrest stemming from the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man who was shot multiple times in the back at close range days earlier. At some point during the night, Rittenhouse said, he tried to stop an unnamed man from hitting windows and the man began to chase him.
The teen told Antioch officers that he had been hit in his lower neck and head with a baseball bat and a skateboard before firing his weapon, according to the police report. A filing by Kenosha prosecutors does not indicate that any of the victims were wielding a baseball bat when they were shot, though video taken that night does show Huber reaching for Rittenhouse’s AR-15 rifle as his skateboard hits Rittenhouse’s shoulder. Grosskreutz, the man Rittenhouse wounded, was armed with a handgun, prosecutors have said.
Before meeting with Rittenhouse, Kenosha detectives interviewed Dominick Black. He’s a friend who purchased the rifle Rittenhouse used that night and was with him after the shootings. Black told detectives that Rittenhouse predicted he would spend the rest of his life in prison. Black also has been charged.
Antioch officers noted small scratches on Rittenhouse’s arms when he turned himself in, but he did not have any cuts or bruises, a police report stated. In the video released Monday, Rittenhouse shows the officers what he says is a cut to his shoulder from falling down, and one of the officers says he’s found bumps on the teen’s head. Paramedics were twice called to the Police Department to treat him. The ambulance arrived the second time shortly before Rittenhouse was taken to a juvenile detention center in Lake County.
Minutes before the ambulance was summoned, Rittenhouse asked to see his mother, who had stepped out of the room. He also asked to read a book to pass the time.
“I feel like I’m about to pass out, I’m not going to lie,” he told a plainclothes police official who stepped in the doorway to check on him. “My stomach is, like, inside out right now.”
For the next few minutes, Rittenhouse flipped through former FBI Director Louis Freeh’s memoir, “My FBI: Bringing Down the Mafia, Investigating Bill Clinton, and Fighting the War on Terror,” before setting it aside.
Minutes later, his mother came back into the room with two police officers.
She sobbed as police informed Kyle Rittenhouse he should anticipate being tried as an adult, rather than a juvenile. They also told him that he would be extradited to Wisconsin to face serious criminal charges.
At one point, Rittenhouse asked the officers what extradition meant. He grew upset as police detailed the process, telling them someone had attacked him “with a (expletive) bat.”
Rittenhouse faces murder and gun charges in Kenosha County. Rittenhouse’s attorneys have argued he shot the men in self-defense. Family members and representatives of the men shot have rejected the idea that Rittenhouse was justified in firing. Racine attorney Mark Richards could not be reached for comment Monday night.
Attorney Kimberley Motley, who represents Grosskreutz, has cast doubt on Rittenhouse’s claim of self-defense since his arrest. While Rittenhouse tried and failed to surrender to police in Kenosha, Motley noted that he crossed back into Illinois before giving himself up.
Motley, who had not seen the newly released police video, said Rittenhouse’s actions in the immediate aftermath of the shooting suggest a lack of confidence in his self-defense argument.
“I think it’s important to note that he … jumped in a car that night and then drove across state lines, back to his house … passing by a countless number of police stations where he could have turned himself in that night within the state of Wisconsin,” she said. “He didn’t do that.”
John Huber, the father of Anthony Huber, said at a November court hearing that Kyle Rittenhouse thinks he is “above the law.”
“It’s not about gun rights. My son was killed. Another man was killed. They didn’t deserve to be killed,” John Huber said during the hearing.
Huber, an avid skateboarder, was memorialized shortly after the shooting. At a skate park, friends and skaters chalked messages on the ramps paying homage. “Anthony Huber is a hero,” one message read.
Rittenhouse, who turned 18 this month, is due back in a Wisconsin courtroom March 10. He is free on $2 million bail raised through several gun advocacy groups and conservative organizations.
