On August 12, 2017, during the "Unite the Right" white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, James Alex Fields Jr., then 20, deliberately drove a 2010 Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counter-protesters on Fourth Street Southeast near the Downtown Mall. Fields had backed his car up a block after being blocked by the crowd, then accelerated toward the pedestrians and two stationary vehicles, striking people at an estimated top speed of 28 mph before reversing at high speed, striking additional people, and fleeing. He was arrested roughly a mile away shortly afterward.
Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal from Charlottesville, was fatally injured and died at the University of Virginia Medical Center. She was the only person killed. Thirty-five others were injured, with testimony at a December 2017 preliminary hearing establishing this total; at least eight victims sustained permanent, significant physical impairment. Heyer had grown up in Ruckersville, Virginia, worked as a paralegal, bartender, and waitress, and was described by friends and family as a passionate advocate for the disenfranchised.
The rally itself had been preceded by a Ku Klux Klan rally in Charlottesville in July 2017 and was organized by Jason Kessler in opposition to the proposed removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. The attack was characterized as an act of domestic terrorism by Charlottesville's mayor, Virginia's public safety secretary, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Fields was initially charged at the state level with second-degree murder, malicious wounding, and hit and run; additional malicious wounding and aggravated malicious wounding charges followed. In December 2017, a preliminary hearing certified ten charges, including first-degree murder. Following a three-week trial, Fields was found guilty on December 7, 2018, of first-degree murder, hit and run, and eight counts of malicious wounding. The jury recommended a life sentence for the murder plus 419 years for the other offenses; this sentence was formally imposed on July 15, 2019.
Separately, a federal grand jury indicted Fields in June 2018 on 30 hate crime counts, including a count resulting in Heyer's death. Fields pleaded guilty to 29 of the 30 counts in March 2019 in an agreement that removed the possibility of the death penalty; he was sentenced to an additional life term on the federal charges on June 28, 2019.
Fields was also a defendant in the civil case Sines v. Kessler, in which a jury in November 2021 found him liable, along with other defendants, for assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and civil conspiracy, awarding $12 million in damages against him as part of roughly $25 million in total damages across all defendants.
The attack drew national attention to white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizing in the United States and prompted memorials, vigils, and public statements from officials, including a widely condemned remark by President Donald Trump referencing "very fine people on both sides." Heyer's mother, Susan Bro, later founded the Heather Heyer Foundation, and a section of the street where the attack occurred was designated "Honorary Heather Heyer Way" in December 2017.
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