DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — A participant in the “No Kings Day” rally held in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday suffered an eye injury from a shooting incident and is uncertain if he’ll regain vision in his right eye.
He was one of the many thousands who joined the demonstrations not only in Southern California but also across the nation.
According to the LAPD, the demonstrations were peaceful until some individuals began throwing bricks and bottles at officers. Several law enforcement officers and protesters sustained injuries when the police intervened to disperse the gathering on Saturday afternoon.
Our sister station ABC7 Eyewitness News spoke to the protester who was shot from his hospital bed at the L.A. General Medical Center.
“They just started opening fire on us, just spraying an obscene amount of rubber bullets just everywhere,” Marshall Woodruff said.
Woodruff says the rally was peaceful until it suddenly got ugly, and that’s when he says he was hit by rubber bullets fired by local law enforcement.
“The bullet fractured my cheek, and it tore part of my eye open, and I had to go into surgery for about four hours or five hours to get it repaired that night,” Woodruff said. “And it’s questionable how much vision I’m going to be able to get back or how much I’m going to be able to see out of my right eye. Right now, it’s just a giant question mark.”
Woodruff said someone helped him get to an LAPD vehicle after he was shot. The officers put him in a car and drove him to an ambulance, which then took him to the hospital.
LAPD and the sheriff’s department say their officers were assaulted with water bottles and bricks. They declared an unlawful assembly and went in to break up the protests. According to LAPD, there were several officers injured, too.
Woodruff’s friends — Jazz Egger and Gavin Prophet — have been keeping him company during his hospital stay. They’ve set up a GoFundMe account to help pay for his medical bills.
Prophet says he was at the protests close to where Marshall was when things, as he put it, went from peaceful to police moving in.
“I think everyone that’s out there was peacefully protesting. And I know that there’s bad apples in any situations, but I don’t think the force that was used to repel the peaceful protesting was justified at all,” Prophet said.
“America is being divided right now, and I believe we have to stand together, no matter what side you are on,” Egger said. “We have to support one another regardless of ethnicity, race, or political affiliation, because love is the only way.”
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