CHARLOTTESVILLE — A police officer radioed for help as angry protesters swarmed around her: “They are pushing the crowd my way and I have nobody here to help me.”
Tammy Shiflett, who had just returned to active duty as an elementary school resource officer after two months recovering from a shoulder surgery, was the only person assigned to block traffic at the intersection where a deadly car attack began in Charlottesville on Aug. 12.
Instead of sending reinforcements, a superior instructed her to abandon her post and move the car that had been positioned in the intersection, leaving a wooden sawhorse as the only barrier keeping vehicles out of the area. Roughly an hour and a half later, a white nationalist drove his car down that very street, striking a crowd of counterprotesters and killing 32-year-old activist Heather Heyer.
The decision by police officials to set up only minimal barriers in preparation for the white nationalist rally and then, in one particularly grave case, to withdraw from a “crucial” intersection was among the dozens of mistakes, missteps and failures cited in a damning report commissioned by the city and publicly released Friday.