A small crowd gathered in Union Square Tuesday evening for a vigil for Jacob Blake, the man shot by police on Sunday in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Blake's legal team confirmed tuesday that the 29-year old is paralyzed from the waist down, with no word on whether he will ever walk again, after the shooting.
Patrick Salvi, one of Blake's attorneys, said at least one bullet went through some or all of Blake’s spinal cord, and that Blake had to have nearly his entire colon and small intestine removed. Blake also suffered damage to his kidney, liver, and stomach, and was shot in the arm, according to Salvi.
Blake’s father, Jacob Blake Sr., made an emotional public statement about the shooting of his son in Wisconsin Tuesday, calling the incident “a senseless attempted murder.”
“They shot my son seven times, seven times, like he didn’t matter,” Blake Sr. said. “But my son mattered. He’s a human being, and he matters.”
One protester at the vigil in New York City told NY1’s Ruschell Boone he felt Blake’s father’s pain.
“I’m not a father, but I’m a father by nature,” he said. “Seven shots. I just can’t see what was going through his head.”
Kenosha police said officers were called to respond to a “domestic incident” on Sunday evening.
Witnesses said that Blake had been on the scene trying to break up a fight between two women.
The video of Blake’s shooting went viral. It shows a man walking toward a car as two officers follow him, weapons drawn. As the man opens the driver’s side door to enter the car, one officer pulls the back of his shirt to stop him and begins to fire. Seven shots can be heard. Blake’s three young children were in the car.
The officers have been placed on administrative leave, but some protesters said that’s simply not enough.
“If it was Black officers, they would have been fired with no pay at all,” one man at the vigil said.
"It’s not enough," another said. "It’s not enough because we need to see them arrested and put in jail.”
That second man also expressed his despair that yet another African American has been shot by police, despite weeks of Black Lives Matter protests.
“I’m always here,” he said. “I said before with George Floyd, 'Again, really, again?' Then with Breonna Taylor, I was like, 'When are you ever gonna get peace? You can’t even sleep in your own home.' And now with Jacob Blake, I’m 100 percent livid.”