Multiple students, student groups, and even faculty members have expressed their support for an online fundraiser attempting to pay for the legal fees of one of the rioters arrested in Lancaster, Pennsylvania over the weekend, as reported by Breitbart.
The rioter in question is 20-year-old Kathryn Patterson, a sorority girl who was among the 13 arrested over the weekend on charges of arson, institutional vandalism, rioting, and obstructing highways, among other charges. She, like the other 12 who have been arrested, is currently being held on a bail of $1 million.
Barbara Altmann, the president of Franklin and Marshall College where Patterson is a student, voiced her support for the effort to pay off Patterson’s legal fees in an Instagram post on Tuesday. Altmann said that “our community is hurting” and that “we all mourn the loss of the life of Mr. Munoz.” Altmann then declared that she “stands by our students’ constitutional right to protest,” and thanked the students “for creating a GoFundMe page to assist Kat and her family; many in our community will be contributing.” Altmann’s post makes no reference to the violence that occurred that night, of which Patterson was a part.
The link was also shared by Patterson’s sorority, Kappa Delta, which Patterson admitted to joining so that she could “surround [myself] with strong, passionate, like-minded women.” The sorority’s Instagram post promoting the GoFundMe falsely described Munoz’s death as a “wrongful murder,” falsely called her arrest “wrongful” and described the charges as “excessive,” and claimed, without evidence, that Patterson was “working as a medic to help out the protesters.” The post also confirmed that the fund was set up by the sorority in conjunction with the school’s Black Student Union, even though Patterson is White. The fund has currently raised only about $49,000, well short of the $1 million needed to even pay her bail, let alone cover the rest of her coming legal fees.
Patterson participated in the violent riots that broke out in protest of the justified police shooting of a deranged man, Ricardo Munoz, after he charged at officers with a knife in hand. Police body camera footage confirmed that Munoz attempted to attack the officers after multiple warnings, which led to his fatal shooting. Munoz was already set to face trial for stabbing four different people in a knife attack last year.
But the rioters, affiliated with the far-left terror groups Black Lives Matter and Antifa, attempted to label his death as another example of “racial injustice.” They threw objects, including bricks and glass bottles, at police officers, damaged police vehicles, and smashed the windows of a police precinct. The police ultimately declared a riot and used tear gas to disperse the crowd, eventually arresting 13 of the rioters, including a teenager. A district judge then set their bail at $1 million each, as all of them face felony charges related to the riot.