When Blake regained consciousness following a police shooting, he turned to his father in tears and asked, ‘Why did they shoot me so many times?’
“Then his next question was, ‘Why did they shoot me so many times?'” Jacob Blake Sr. told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on “New Day” Friday morning. “And I said, ‘Baby they weren’t supposed to shoot you at all.'”
But what bothered Jacob Blake Sr. the most, he said, was that his son’s leg was shackled to the hospital bed.
“Why do they have that cold steel on my son’s ankle?” he asked. “He can’t get up, he couldn’t get up if he wanted to.”
Blake, 29, is hospitalized in Wauwatosa, and family members say the sight of him tied to the bed is heartbreaking.
“This is an insult to injury,” said Justin Blake, his uncle. “He is paralyzed and can’t walk and they have him cuffed to the bed. Why?”
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers said he “couldn’t imagine” why Blake was handcuffed.
“I would have no personal understanding why that would be necessary,” Evers told reporters. “I would hope that we would be able to find a more, a better way to help him … in recovering. That seems counterintuitive. It seems to be bad medicine.”
The Froedtert Hospital, where Blake is being treated, deferred CNN’s questions to the Wisconsin Department of Justice. The Kenosha police and sheriff’s department, as well as the district attorney’s office, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“There is no explanation for it,” Blake family attorney Benjamin Crump said. “It follows the pattern of deliberate indifference and excessive force.”
“My son has not been afforded the rights of a human,” Jacob Blake Sr. said.
People gather to protest over the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Investigators issue their first version of events
Kenosha Police Officer Rusten Sheskey fired into Blake’s back on Sunday while he was trying to enter a vehicle with his three children watching from the backseat.
The incident started when a woman called police and said “her boyfriend was present and was not supposed to be on the premises,” the Wisconsin Department of Justice Division of Criminal Investigation said.
In a police call, a dispatcher names Blake and says he “isn’t supposed to be there” and that he took the complainant’s keys and refused to leave. The dispatcher later explains she doesn’t have more details because the caller was “uncooperative.”
About five minutes after the initial report, a dispatcher received reports of shots fired, police said.
Officers had attempted to arrest Blake and used a Taser in a failed attempt to stop him, the DCI said. He walked around his vehicle, “opened the driver’s side door and leaned forward,” the agency said.
Sheskey has been with the department for seven years. No other officer fired their weapon.
Blake admitted he had a knife in his possession, and law enforcement agents said they recovered a knife from the driver’s side floorboard of his vehicle, the agency said.
State investigators did not indicate why police moved to arrest Blake, whether he brandished or threatened to use the knife, or why Sheskey shot so many times into Blake’s back. It does not mention his children in the vehicle or other family members standing just feet away.
Sheskey and another officer have been placed on administrative leave.
On Friday, the Wisconsin DOJ released a statement identifying two additional officers involved in the incident as Kenosha Police Officers Vincent Arenas and Brittany Meronek.
Arenas — who also used his Taser in an unsuccessful attempt to stop Blake, the statement says — has been with the Kenosha Police Department since February 2019, after previously serving with the US Capitol Police in Washington. Meronek joined the department in January, the statement said.
CNN has reached out to the Kenosha Professional Police Association for comment.
His attorneys told CNN that Blake did not have a weapon in the car.
“I can’t speak directly to what he owned, but what I can say is that his three children were in the car,” Patrick Salvi Jr. told CNN. “That was on the forefront of his mind. That is the most important thing to him in his life — his family and his children.”
CNN’s Brad Parks, Sara Sidner and Raja Razek contributed to this report.