Jury convicts student who wore gorilla mask to Black Lives Matter rally of misdemeanor

A Tennessee jury found a man who attended a Black Lives Matter rally at East Tennessee State University while wearing a gorilla mask and dangling bananas on ropes guilty of one misdemeanor count of disrupting a meeting.

Tristan Rettke, who was a former East Tennessee State University student, was cleared of most charges Wednesday, with a court finding him not guilty of two counts each of civil rights intimidation and disorderly conduct, according to an NBC affiliate. The jury recommended Rettke pay a $500 fine.

{mosads} Rettke was arrested in September 2018 after the protest. He was dressed in overalls, wearing a gorilla mask, carrying bananas and barefoot.

Witnesses at the rally testified that Rettke used racial slurs and tried to scare them, according to NBC.

Now-deleted video from the protest shows Rettke distributing the bananas from a burlap sack with a marijuana leaf and a Confederate flag, as well as holding a sign that said “lives matter.”

The area on campus where the protest took place is considered a “free speech zone.”

Rettke’s attorneys argued in court that he is a “heckler.”

“What is he? He’s a heckler,” Attorney Patrick Denton said Tuesday. “He’s a heckler for that protest and, as much as [the assistant district attorney] doesn’t want to acknowledge, that’s speech. It obviously is. We all understand that.”