Jacob Blake, the black man who was shot seven times by a Kenosha policeman, said he thought he was going to die and shared what he thought were his last words with his children after the shooting at August.
Blake, 29, was partially paralyzed in the August 23 shooting that sparked days of protests and unrest in the city of Wisconsin and elsewhere.
“I got slack,” Blake told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in an interview that airs Thursday. “And all I remember then was leaning back, looking at my boys. I said, ‘Daddy loves you no matter what.'”
“I thought it would be the last – I thought it would be the last thing I would say to them,” he said. “Thank goodness it wasn’t.”
The interview comes a week after Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley announced that no police would be charged in the shooting.
Blake was shot seven times by Kenosha Constable Rusten Sheskey. It was discovered that some of these blows came from behind.
Sheskey was responding to a domestic disturbance call at the time and officers were told Blake had an arrest warrant for him, officials said. Blake resisted arrest while armed with a knife and refused to drop it, the district attorney said.
Blake was shot after moving to a “disputed car” that contained at least one child, Graveley said. He said Blake admitted to investigators he had a knife but was not sure he opened it.
Graveley said that Sheskey and other officers would have made a strong case for self-defense, and that “if you don’t believe you can prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt, you have an ethical obligation not to lay charges. “
The shooting was caught on video and sparked protests over the summer that at times turned violent as protesters called for racial justice and police reform.
Amid protests in Kenosha, Kyle Rittenhouse, now 18, who traveled to Kenosha from Antioch, Illinois, reportedly shot and killed two men. Rittenhouse was criminally charged and lawyers for him claimed he acted in self-defense.
The Blake shooting followed the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police in May and the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville in March.
