Burning Hate: Fears and Loathing in Charlottesville

This is an update in the Burning Hate series - stories of the men who marched with tiki torches on August 11, 2017. Read the introductory piece here. Read the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth installments.

William Henry Fears IV was not hard to find when Albemarle County deputies flew south to effect extradition last week. He was waiting for them in Dalhart, a medium-security men's prison in the Texas panhandle where's been since he pleaded guilty in 2019 to choking an ex-girlfriend. At his last parole hearing in September 2022, the Texas parole board denied early release, citing his criminal history, which includes a conviction for aggravated kidnapping. In 2009, a 22 year old Fears drove to the University of Texas at Tyler and abducted his 18 year old ex-girlfriend from her dormitory at knifepoint and stabbed her repeatedly.

It was during that first prison term, Fears claims, that he became radicalized, later telling a reporter, "I don’t think any race experiences racism in the modern world the way that white people do in a jail." Shortly after serving most of that seven year sentence, William Fears made the two hour drive from his mother's house in Pasadena, TX to see Richard Spencer, a rising star of the new Alt-Right movement, speak at Texas A&M in December 2016.

Things escalated quickly for William Fears. Barely a month later, as airports across the country filled with protesters decrying Trump's Muslim travel ban, people were gathered outside of the airport in Houston with messages of love and support for international students at the University of Houston who had been detained. According to Reverend Hannah Bonner, William Fears arrived hoping to make a scene. Bonner says Fears shoved her repeatedly as she attempted to deescalate the situation and keep the swastika-sign bearing white supremacist away from the group of women and children. It was when she turned her back on him, she writes, that he pulled a knife on her.

Throughout 2017, William Fears and his brother Colton made frequent public appearances at rallies and demonstrations across Texas. In April, they counter-protested a protest against Governor Abbott. In May, Fears and other White Lives Matter activists violently disrupted a May Day march in Austin.

On June 10, 2017, William Fears was part of the ragtag group of fascists following the Daily Stormer's Robert "Azzmador" Ray to rally in Houston's Hermann Park. The rally was organized by a right-wing militia group in response to an online hoax. 'Antifa' never planned to destroy the Sam Houston statue in the park and the militia groups that organized the rally ejected the openly fascist interlopers led by Robert Ray. William Fears refused to leave, belligerently remaining inside the park with his hand-drawn Pepe the Frog posters, gaining brief fame as a meme himself for his cries of "What about the memes?"

The situation escalated and a member of the militia group briefly placed Fears in a head lock, which Fears reported to the Houston Police. According to records later produced by the Alachua County State Attorney's Office, the Fears brothers began threatening the man. He received so many threatening calls that he eventually changed his phone number. The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force created a report on the incident in Guardian, a terrorism reporting management system, to determine whether there was a risk of serious violence if the Fears brothers and their Alt-Right associates retaliated against the heavily armed extremist militia group. It's impossible to determine if other Guardian reports were opened regarding the Fears brothers that summer, as this one was almost certainly only made public by accident as part of a packet of records released by a separate agency, but it does mean that the Fears brothers were, without a doubt, on the FBI's radar during the summer of 2017.

The flight from Texas to Virginia last week wasn't even Fears' first extradition from one jail to another - the strangulation charges that put him in Dalhart were filed in October 2017, but Harris County, Texas couldn't get their hands on Fears until he could be extradited from Alachua County, Florida where he'd been charged in connection with an attempted homicide after Richard Spencer's speech at the University of Florida. The Florida charges against William Fears were eventually dropped, but his brother Colton Fears pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact to attempted first degree homicide and was sentenced to five years. Their friend Tyler Tenbrink pleaded no contest to aggravated assault with a firearm and felon in possession of a firearm and received fifteen years.

William Fears left Florida in handcuffs but without any charges for the incident on October 19, 2017. It was Tyler Tenbrink who fired a weapon at anti-racist protesters and Colton Fears who drove the car away from the scene. But according to victims, witnesses, and the men themselves, the altercation began with William Fears leaping from the still-moving car to further provoke the people on the sidewalk after shouting "Heil Hitler!" at them from his open window. Witnesses describe Fears screaming "I'm going to fucking kill you!" at the victims, then turning to Tenbrink and urging him to "Shoot them!" and "Kill them!" Tenbrink fired a single shot into a wall before all three men fled the scene in a Jeep registered to the Fears' mother.

According to FBI interviews of his associates after the Gainesville shooting, William Fears knew he was going to jail. He drove to Florida hungry for a violent confrontation - one last shot at starting the race war before spending a few years in prison for another violent attack on a woman. Fears' most recent ex-girlfriend, the woman he'd assaulted before heading to Florida, told agents that Fears had a reputation in alt-right circles for his "hair-trigger" temper and he believed "the best thing to happen for the alt-right movement was if somebody got killed." She said Fears "wanted to be the martyr." In a later interview with the same agent, Fears' associate Tyler Tenbrink said William Fears "wanted to go out like John Dillinger style."

“If I’m killed, that’s fine. Maybe I’ll be a martyr or something, or remembered.”
  - William Fears to a Washington Post reporter after Unite the Right

The woman who was dating William's brother Colton Fears at the time told the agents that Colton had not wanted to go to Gainesville at all, something William's ex also told the agents in her interview and corroborated by a confidential human source in a report filed before the incident. Both women described a younger brother who looked up to William Fears, describing Colton as a 'follower' who held his brother in 'high regard.' Colton's girlfriend was not the only person interviewed who described Colton's presence in both Gainesville and Charlottesville as reluctant, something of a chaperone for his hot-headed brother, "to keep him from doing anything stupid."

"If there is going to be a violent race war, maybe we should do it, maybe we should escalate it."
  - William Fears to the Washington Post

In video taken during the heat of the fighting at Unite the Right, those around William Fears can be seen trying to rein him in. In one video, Elliot Kline, then the leader of Identity Evropa, is heard shouting "Will! Will!" calling Fears back from another attempted foray into the street full of counter protesters, then shaking his head disapprovingly at Fears, as though he were an incorrigible and rambunctious child. In another video, the League of the South's Michael Tubbs puts his arm out to physically prevent Fears from jabbing a man with his flagpole, then guides him away from the entrance to the park. It seems those who knew William Fears knew he had a reckless thirst for violent confrontation and, try as they sometimes did, they couldn't always stop him. In his own words, he was there to "kill fucking commie scum."

Despite video of Fears instigating numerous assaults throughout the morning of August 12, 2017, he was never charged in connection with the rally that day. The charges he now faces in Albemarle County are for the torch lit rally the evening before. In February 2023, five and a half years after that night in August, a grand jury in Albemarle County indicted Fears on the felony charge of burning an object on public property with the intent to intimidate. The charge carries a maximum sentence of five years. While the only similarly-charged defendant in these cases to receive a sentence at this point was given only 6 months, Fears, with his extensive criminal history, will likely not fare as well.

A critical element of the charge being brought is intent. Merely burning an object on UVA's grounds may be disallowed, but it isn't felonious. The chants of 'Blood and Soil" and "White Lives Matter" are only words - hateful, but protected speech. The march itself is, of course, a First Amendment protected activity. For those critical of these prosecutions, each of these aspects is taken up in turn, in isolation, and the conclusion is that there could be no crime here. But such a bad faith interpretation of the facts not only ignores how those elements work in concert, but it is contrary to William Fears' own explanation of his actions. He came to Charlottesville to kill, and perhaps be killed, in pursuit of provoking racial violence. He wanted to be there when the first shot of the race war was fired, even if that meant catching it himself.

Standing close enough to almost touch the trapped counter protestors with his right hand outstretched in a Nazi salute, William Fears grinned from ear to ear as he chanted "White Lives Matter!" Moments later, as chanting gave way to a brawl, Fears charged the counter protesters, swinging his lit torch at people who had nowhere to run.

William Fears was booked into the Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail just after 4am on June 23, 2023. His first appearance in Albemarle County Circuit Court will be on June 28. As of this writing, there is no attorney of record on the case.