Man arrested for driving through protest crowd, but with a couple of big twists

By this point, we’ve sadly grown used to stories about some motorist who finds themself trapped in the middle of a street that’s been shut down by a Black Lives Matter protest. When rioters begin to menace them, the frightened driver punches the gas and begins knocking down or running over demonstrators in an effort to flee for their lives. A similar – and yet very different – scene played out this weekend in the tiny town of Eaton, Colorado (population 4,365), located well to the north of Denver. But the details of the vehicular assault mark it as an incident nearly the opposite of almost all the ones you’ve been hearing about this year.

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First of all, the protest in question wasn’t a Black Lives Matter march. It was a Blue Lives Matter demonstration in support of law enforcement officials. Also, the driver in question hadn’t been blockaded in the middle of the street. The protest was taking place on the grassy field of a local park. And the motorist wasn’t “fleeing in terror” from anyone. He deliberately steered his SUV off of the street and went crashing across the park to intentionally run down the demonstrators. (CBS Denver)

The Eaton Police Department arrested a man accused of driving an SUV through a crowd of pedestrians at a “Blue Lives Matter” rally on Saturday.

The driver of a maroon SUV exited the roadway in the 200 block of Collins Street and drove through the grass park where the participants were gathered, investigators said on Facebook. The driver sped off.

The suspect was taken into custody minutes later at the 1100 block of 2nd Street Road.

During a press conference held later, the police declined to identify the subject. But in a hamlet of barely 4,000 people, there isn’t a lot of police data to sift through on any given day. Police records show that there was only one arrest made on Saturday and the driver in question was 21-year-old Isaiah Cordova.

Cordova has been charged with seven counts of attempted first-degree assault, seven counts of felony menacing, and reckless driving. Thankfully, nobody was killed during the attack or he’d have been looking at vehicular homicide charges on top of everything else. No information was available regarding previous incidents of criminal activity involving Cordova.

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Even taking into consideration the fact that this attack took place in such a small village as opposed to something in Seattle, Portland or the Big Apple, it’s still somewhat remarkable that we haven’t heard more about this from the mainstream media. While smaller in size, this was still a protest relevant to the current debates over policing in the United States. And ramming into a crowd with an SUV is still an obvious attempt at murdering people who were exercising their First Amendment rights. And to top it off, these protesters were actually behaving peacefully. (Go figure, right?)

The demonstrators also apparently had a permit to be in the park for this event. It shouldn’t require an advanced college degree to pick out some of the differences between this attack and previous vehicular incidents in terms of both the demonstrators and the attacker. Nobody was being menaced by the participants in the Blue Lives Matter demonstration. There were no fires being set, no storefront windows being smashed, no shops being looted and there wasn’t a Molotov cocktail on display for as far as the eye could see. The motorist was neither trapped nor threatened and nobody was attempting to damage his vehicle or drag him out of it. He was free to continue about his business but chose instead to attempt to murder some people for the sin of supporting their local police department.

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Despite the lack of interest being shown by our favorite cable news outlets, I’ll pin Mr. Cordova in a saved search slot and try to keep track of what happens to him. I’m guessing somebody from the ACLU will be along to provide him with a free lawyer in short order.

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | November 21, 2024
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David Strom 11:20 AM | November 21, 2024
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