Anti-Trump Activist Gets Two New Felony Charges to Go with Attempted Murder Allegation After Cops See Video from Month Before
A left-wing activist accused of running over two Trump supporters at a protest in September was slapped with additional charges this week after authorities reviewed video footage of her actions at a similar event the month prior.
Tatiana Rita Turner of Long Beach, California, faces a total of 13 felony charges after two counts of assault with a deadly weapon were added by prosecutors, who accuse her of beating two men so severely in August that one of the alleged victims required staples.
The 40-year-old activist also faces an additional charge for allegedly using a stun gun at the “March 4 Equality” event in September that she helped organize. Turner was previously accused of committing deliberate attempted murder with her vehicle at that protest.
The Orange County district attorney’s office announced Wednesday that the new charges were added following a “months-long review” of video evidence from the respective events.
Turner will now also be charged with two felony counts of assault with a deadly weapon — “including one causing great bodily injury,” the DA’s office said — in connection with the Aug. 29 protest in Seal Beach, California.
Prosecutors say she used “an approximately four-foot rod to repeatedly beat two men as they lay on the ground” after they had already been attacked by other activists.
In connection with the events at the Sept. 26, 2020, rally in Yorba Linda, California, Turner had previously been charged with “one felony count of attempted murder with premeditation and deliberation, six felony counts of assault with a deadly weapon, including one causing great bodily injury, one felony count of mayhem, and two felony counts of the use of pepper spray by a felon.”
She now faces the additional charge for felony use of a stun gun.
“She positioned her vehicle to be used as a backup weapon and she used that vehicle as a deadly weapon, willing to injure and kill those who stood in her way,” Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said in a statement when Turner was first charged in September with driving her car into a crowd of Trump supporters, Fox News reported.
If convicted on all 13 charges, Turner could be looking at a maximum sentence of seven years to life plus 26 years locked up in state prison.
She has previously been convicted for selling drugs and domestic violence.
The Orange County DA also announced it had charged five other individuals in connection to the “March 4 Equality” protest and pro-Trump counterprotest in Yorba Linda after reviewing footage from that day.
“We support the right to peacefully protest, but these are not peaceful protests. These are organized protests that encourage others to engage in civil disobedience and violence. We continue to review all surveillance footage to identify other suspects, regardless of what side of an issue they are on,” Spitzer said in a statement.
If the events of Jan. 6 have taught us anything, it’s that opposing senselessly violent protests doesn’t have to be a partisan issue.
It doesn’t have to be — but it too often is.
You would think that the vast majority of Americans could examine what happened in September in Yorba Linda or earlier this month on Capitol Hill and agree violent protests should be broadly denounced regardless of the ideology behind a given demonstration.
And perhaps the vast majority of Americans do agree on this point and simply aren’t being adequately represented by the corporate establishment media complex that very carefully curates which incidents of not-so-peaceful protest they’ll justify and which they’ll use to demonize millions of law-abiding Americans who have committed the heinous thought-crime of voting for Donald Trump.
It’s heartening that both demonstrators on both sides of the political aisle have been charged in what sounds like a shameful adulteration of the First Amendment all the way around.
What’s disheartening is that, in the court of public opinion, the establishment media’s proverbial prosecutors are throwing the book at Trump supporters as far-left activists like Turner sit on the jury.
The left has long been painting themselves as the freedom-fighting victims of a tyrannical, fascist regime and its supporters when all along, the violence has originated overwhelmingly from their side.
Meanwhile, millions of Trump supporters have now found themselves unwittingly implicated in an “insurrection” simply for questioning the results of the election.
Turner deserves a fair trial, as do the accused Capitol Hill rioters.
But after the events of the last few months, will anyone other than radical leftists get a fair shake in the establishment media’s court again?
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