Brock Turner’s home draws armed protesters in Ohio

Michael Walsh
·Reporter

Armed protesters gathered outside the home of the parents of Brock Turner in his home state of Ohio over the weekend, after he served just three months of his six-month sentence for the sexual assault of an unconscious woman behind a dumpster at Stanford University.

On Tuesday morning, the convicted felon, 21, registered as a sex offender at Greene County Sheriff’s Office in Xenia, Ohio. He will need to serve probation for three years.

“This morning, when Mr. Turner came into our office, he was treated the same as any other sex offender when they come in. We didn’t go out of our way to offer any extras at all,” Greene County Sheriff Gene Fischer said in an interview with Yahoo News.

Widespread outrage erupted when Turner was released from jail in Santa Clara County, Calif., on Friday, after serving three months behind bars for sexually assaulting someone on the Stanford campus, where he was a student at the time. The anger was compounded by his early release “on good behavior.”

The short length of the sentence imposed by Judge Aaron Persky was widely criticized. Dozens of locals set up a demonstration near his parents’ house in Sugarcreek Township. They had moved to their new home from Oakwood, where Turner attended high school, around the time of the assault.

The demonstrators carried homemade signs bearing messages like “Castrate rapists,” “If it wasn’t rape then why’d you run?” and “If I rape Brock will I only do three months?”

Several protesters brought firearms. Ohio is an open-carry state, so it does not appear that they were breaking any laws.

Protester Micah Naziri told NBC-affiliate KNTV that he joined fellow Greene County residents with AR-15 assault rifles to show Turner that the community will not tolerate “people raping women and then getting a slap on the wrist.”

“No one is going to shoot him unless we see him victimizing people,” Naziri said.

Another protester told WCPO, “If he is uncomfortable, then he begins to receive at least some punishment that he deserves for his crime.”

The Sugarcreek Township Police Department declined to comment when contacted by Yahoo News.