Charlottesville suspect called Heather Heyer’s mother ‘anti-white supremacist,’ ‘communist’

The self-professed neo-Nazi accused of killing a woman with his car during a 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., attacked the victim’s mother during taped phone calls from jail.

James Alex Fields Jr., 21, is currently on trial for the first-degree murder of Heather Heyer, a woman who was killed when Fields rammed his car into a group of counterprotesters. 

{mosads}Jurors heard a taped phone call between Fields and his mother from jail in December 2017 going after Heyer’s mother Susan Bro, CBS 19 News reported Tuesday.

Fields accused Bro of publicly slandering him and called her a “communist” and “anti-white supremacist.”

“She lost her daughter,” his mother reminded him.

“It doesn’t (expletive) matter,” Fields said.

His mother advised him to “stop talking” but her son insisted that Bro is “the enemy.” 

“She is a communist, mother. … She is the enemy,” he said.

In other taped phone calls, he told his mother that he was “mobbed by a violent group of terrorists.”

“They were waving the ISIS flag,” Fields claimed while referring to them as anti-fascists. “They support them.” No one else who attended the rally has corroborated that claim.

The phone calls offered the jury a different perspective to Fields, who was seemingly remorseful shortly after his arrest, The Washington Post reported.

He reportedly sobbed and hyperventilated for several minutes when detectives told him that several people were severely injured. 

“I’m really sorry,” Fields is heard saying in police body camera footage. “I’m really sorry that, I don’t know. I didn’t want to hurt people, but I thought they were attacking me.”

Prosecutors presented evidence of how Fields traveled from his Ohio hometown to Virginia in his 2010 Dodge Challenger to attend the Unite the Right rally. 

The August 2017 white nationalist gathering in Charlottesville was organized in response to the planned removal of a Confederate statue. 

Fields texted his mother shortly before leaving to tell her that he had gotten time off work so he could attend the rally. She told him to be careful.

“We’re not the one (sic) who need to be careful,” Fields responded on Aug. 11, 2017, while attaching a photo depicting Adolf Hitler, the Post reported.

Fields’s defense team is not denying that Fields killed Heyer with his car, but is arguing that he feared for his life and believed he was acting in self-defense.

A first-degree murder conviction requires the suspect to have the intent to kill at the time of the crime, the Post noted.

If convicted, he faces a maximum punishment of life in prison. He could also be found guilty of second-degree murder, which is punishable by up to 40 years in prison.

Fields is also facing five additional counts of aggravated malicious wounding and three counts of malicious wounding related to some of the 35 people injured during the crash.