An Ohio man will serve three years and 10 months for his part in a group of white men who brutally beat a black man in a parking garage during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge on Monday afternoon sentenced 20-year-old Daniel Borden to 20 years for his participation in the beating of DeAndre Harris, but suspended 16 years and two months of the sentence. Borden will also get 16 months’ credit for the time he’s already served since he was taken into custody.Borden is the third man to be sentenced for the attack on Harris, who was 20 at the time. Clad in a white construction helmet emblazoned with the words “Commie Killer” and armed with a wooden pole, Borden was caught on video alongside five other white men kicking and beating Harris as he lay bloodied on the ground.The video went viral and became a defining image of the violent events in the Virginia college town, when hundreds of white supremacists marched with torches and chanted slurs as they protested the planned removal of Confederate statues on campus. The video also spurred an online campaign to identify the perpetrators at the scene.
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Harris sustained serious injuries from the beating, including a head laceration requiring 10 staples, a spinal injury, a broken wrist and a chipped tooth.According to police records viewed by the Cincinnati Enquirer, Borden had a history of violent, racist behavior, including pulling a knife on a high school peer when he was 13 because he thought he was Jewish. The same student told police that Borden frequently doodled swastikas and did Nazi salutes.Last August, Jacob Scott Goodwin, a 24-year-old neo-Nazi sympathizer from Arkansas, and Alex Michael Ramos, a 34-year-old former militia member from Georgia, were sentenced to eight and six years, respectively, for their part in the beating. Tyler Watkins Davis, a 50-year-old Florida man, was arraigned on malicious wounding charges linked to the beating last October, and will go to trial in February.In other consequences from the violent acts in Charlottesville, avowed neo-Nazi James Fields Jr. was sentenced last month to life in prison for killing Heather Heyer when he rammed his car into a group of counterprotesters.Cover: In this Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017, photo, DeAndre Harris is assaulted in a parking garage beside the Charlottesville police station after a white nationalist rally was dispersed by police, in Charlottesville, Va. (Zach D. Roberts via AP, File)