Heather Heyer’s Murderer Faces Life in Prison Plus 419 Years
A jury recommended life in prison plus 419 years on Tuesday for James Alex Fields Jr., the avowed neo-Nazi who murdered Heather Heyer, and injured about 35 others, when he intentionally drove his car into a crowd of anti-racism protesters during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. He had been convicted on Friday of 10 charges, including the first-degree murder of Heyer, who was 32, as well as five counts of aggravated malicious wounding, three counts of malicious wounding, and one count of failing to stop at an accident involving a death. Six of the counts had a maximum sentence of life in prison. (The jury’s verdict was for Fields to receive 70 years for each of the five counts of aggravated malicious wounding; 20 years for each of the three counts of malicious wounding; and nine years for leaving the scene of a fatal crash.) His overall sentence recommendation, The Washington Post reports, was life plus 419 years and $480,000 in fines. A judge will formally sentence Fields on March 29.
“Heather was full of love, justice, and fairness,” Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, said when confronting her daughter’s killer in court. “Mr. Fields tried to silence her, but I refuse to allow that. . . . I’m the type of mom where if you mess with my kid on the playground, it’s on.” Heyer’s “death was an explosion to the world,” she continued. “We are forever scarred by pain.”
Fields also faces a separate federal trial for various alleged hate crimes related to the incident, according to The Washington Post, “including one offense that carries a possible death sentence,” though no trial date has been set, and the Justice Department has not announced whether it will seek capital punishment.
“Please know that the world is not a safe place with Fields in it,” The Daily Beast reported Wednesday Bowie, who was hit by Fields’s car, told the jury. News of the white nationalist’s guilty verdict, she said, was “the best [she’s] felt in a year [and] a half.”
