Can’t have a protester disrupting a rally for Hillary.
Via Trib Live:
A protester was arrested Saturday afternoon before the Hillary Clinton rally in Pittsburgh after he got into a scuffle with another protester who tried to stop him from burning an American flag.
The man, whom police and court records identified as Joshua Sturman, 23, of Westlake Village, Calif., approached a group of Donald Trump supporters protesting shortly before 5:15 p.m. near 10th and Penn avenues. Clinton was scheduled to appear Saturday evening at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center .
Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Emily Schaffer said Sturman pulled out an American flag and attempted to light it on fire.
It is not a crime in the United States to burn an American flag.
One of the other protesters, a Trump supporter, tried to grab the flag from him because he feared for the group’s safety, Schaffer said, and Sturman tackled him.
Cellphone video shows the suspect, wearing a white T-shirt with a red bandana over his face, struggling with someone wearing a backpack before falling to the ground and crashing into a planter.
Richard Dillon, 68, of Ross tumbled to the ground with the man.
“Symbolically, he was saying, ‘I will burn down everything you stand for’ — beginning with the flag, Old Glory,” said Dillon, an early Tea Party organizer in Pittsburgh. “We cannot let the country be commandeered by people like that.”