by Adedotun Michael

The 21-year-old accused of plowing a car into a crowd of people protesting a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville has been reported by his school teacher to be fascinated with Nazism, idolized Adolf Hitler, and had been singled out by school officials in the 9th grade for his “deeply held, radical” convictions on race.

The teacher, Derek Weimer disclosed in an interview with The Associated Press that, James Alex Fields Jr. also confided that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was younger and had been prescribed an anti-psychotic medication.

Weimer, who said he was Fields’ social studies teacher at Randall K. Cooper high school in Union, Kentucky during Field’s junior and senior years said, “In high school, Fields was an ‘average’ student, but with a keen interest in military history, Hitler, and Nazi Germany”

Weimer said further, “Once you talked to James for a while, you would start to see that sympathy towards Nazism, that idolization of Hitler, that belief in white supremacy. It would start to creep out.”

Fields who had been photographed earlier carrying the emblem of Vanguard America, one of the hate groups that organized the “take America back” campaign in protest of the removal of a Confederate statue has been charged by Police with second-degree murder and other counts for allegedly driving his silver Dodge Challenger through a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, killing a 32-year-old woman and wounding at least 19 other people.

Editor