The Democrats candidate in the United States presidential election, Joe Biden, said he spoke by telephone Thursday with Jacob Blake, the black man gravely wounded when a white policeman shot him repeatedly in the back, and that the victim said “nothing” would defeat him.
“I had an opportunity to spend some time with Jacob on the phone. He’s out of (intensive care), we spoke for about 15 minutes,” Biden told a community meeting at a church in Kenosha, the Wisconsin city that erupted in chaotic protests last week after Blake was shot.
“He talked about how nothing was going to defeat him, how whether he walked again or not, he was not going to give up,” Biden added.
Biden and his wife Jill made a two-city trip to Wisconsin, a key swing state, first stopping in Milwaukee for a meeting with Blake’s family members and then motorcading to Kenosha for a conversation with community stakeholders.
The state’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers said Thursday that he didn’t want Biden, nor President Donald Trump who visited Kenosha Tuesday, to make the trips during the current unrest. But ‘candidates can make their decisions’ and ‘it is what it is,’ Evers said, according to the Associated Press.
In Milwaukee, reporters were kept outside the hour-long meeting, but the campaign said the Democratic nominee and his wife met with Jacob Blake’s father, Jacob Blake Sr., his sisters Letetra Widman and Zietha Blake, his brother Myron Jackson, and lawyers Patrick Salvi Sr. and B’Ivory LaMarr.
His mother Julia Jackson and attorney Ben Crump joined the meeting by phone.
Crump put out a statement about the meeting, as Biden was revealing his phone conversation also included Blake, who was shot seven times in the back by police with three of his children in his car. He’s likely paralyzed from the waist down.
