I came across this clip by accident yesterday while looking at something else related to the Rittenhouse trial on YouTube. I wound up watching most of it (it’s 2 1/2 hours long) and found a couple of things pretty revealing. I’ll get to those in a moment but first let me explain what this video contains.

On October 6, 2020, about six weeks after he was shot by Kyle Rittenhouse, Gaige Grosskreutz was pulled over early in the morning by Kenosha police who’d seen him make a turn without using a turn signal. Bodycam footage shows the lead officer asked Grosskreutz for his license and registration but Grosskreutz kept his hands on the wheel and mostly refused to speak. He wouldn’t even give the officer his name.

The officer asked him to get out of the car and asked if he’d been drinking. At this point, Grosskreutz kept repeating that he wanted to speak to his attorney and wouldn’t answer any questions until he’d done that.

The officer indicated that he could smell alcohol on Grosskreutz’ breath and that he appeared to be slurring his speech. He asked him to perform a field sobriety test but Grosskreutz wouldn’t agree to that, repeating over and over that he wanted to talk to his attorney first.

Meanwhile, there was another person in the car. The passenger will be recognizable to anyone who watched the trial. He’s Jacob Marshall, Grosskreutz’s best friend and former roommate. And here’s the first interesting thing I saw in this bodycam video. Since Grosskreutz wasn’t talking, police tried to get the story of what the pair had been doing that night from Marshall instead. “We’re not getting very much cooperation out of your buddy here, what’s his deal?” the officer asked Marshall.

“He’s a little apprehensive,” Marshall replied.

“Why is he refusing to answer basic questions? He’s refusing to identify himself as well,” the officer said.

“I don’t know, personally, I don’t want to give out too much information about him,” Marshall said, adding that he’d been in the “national news recently.”

At first, Marshall seems to be acting more like a normal person, willing to have a conversation with police. He explains they’d come from “a buddy’s house” and then stopped at McDonalds. But Marshall’s willingness to talk changes the moment the officer mentions that he could smell alcohol on the (as yet unidentified) driver’s breath.

“You know how much he’s had to drink tonight?” the officer asked.

“Um, personally, I have no idea,” Marshall said.

The officer asked if they’d been drinking at the buddy’s house where they’d come from.

“No, we actually weren’t” Marshall said.

“There’s no need to lie, he smells like it,” the officer said. He added, “So just be honest.”

“Yeah, no,” Marshall replied.

No, yeah—what?” the officer asked.

“I’m not sure,” Marshall said.

“You’re not sure if you guys were drinking over there?” the officer asked.

Marshall again replied that he was not sure about the drinking. “That’s interesting,” the officer replied.

It’s pretty clear if you watch the clip that the officer is convinced Jacob Marshall is lying about the drinking to protect his friend Gaige Grosskreutz. He’s lying even though there’s pretty compelling evidence that Grosskreutz has been drinking. In fact, a blood draw would eventually find he was nearly three times over the legal limit. Put simply, Grosskreutz was blotto drunk that night but Jacob Marshall is lying to the officer’s face and saying they weren’t drinking to protect his friend.

Why is that significant? Because Marshall met with Grosskreutz in the hospital the morning after the shooting. He posted a photo of the two of them on social media along with some comments saying Grosskreutz’ one regret was that he hadn’t emptied his gun into Kyle Rittenhouse when he had the chance. But when questioned about that on the stand, Marshall claimed he’d made it all up.

“You just posted something about your friend, your roommate, that was a lie?” defense lawyer Corey Chirafisi asked him.

“I did,” Marshall replied. “Given the circumstances and all the threats I’ve received on the internet—I’ve never been put in a position like that. Addresses of ours were posted, you know. My mother was getting inboxed, my sister, it was insane.”…

Marshall added, “I lied. The words never came out of his mouth—100 percent made it all up.”

Hopefully, you see where I’m going with this. When the authorities asked Jacob Marshall what Grosskreutz had been drinking during that DUI stop, Marshall told a blatant lie to protect his friend. And just over a year later he was on the stand being asked about his friend’s behavior and this time he claimed his own words were a lie, knowing that if he admitted Grosskreutz had said he wanted to murder Rittenhouse that was going to be a big problem for his best friend. In short, Jacob Marshall seems like a committed friend but not a very reliable witness.

Eventually, Grosskreutz admitted that the car he’d been driving did belong to him. The officer returned to his car and ran the license plate and finally got Grosskreutz name. Since he wouldn’t take a field sobriety test, he was arrested. He was taken to the station for partial booking and then transported to an emergency room where his blood was drawn.

The second noticeable thing happened during this stretch of the video. At some point, Grosskreutz began staring at one of the officers and continued staring at him for so long that one of the officers asked if there was a staring contest going on. Grosskreutz, who’d said almost nothing the entire night, asked one officer for his name and badge number. When another officer spoke to him, Grosskreutz said, “I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to you back there,” indicating the other officer.

Grosskreutz is being booked for DUI (or maybe it’s DWI in Kenosha) and yet what comes through is that he’s still incredibly hostile to the police. He’s making note of their names and badge numbers. And when he’s finally walked out of the emergency room back to a squad car, he once again stares at one of the officers as if trying to intimidate him. Granted he was pretty drunk but in this case it doesn’t seem to have softened his anti-police fervor at all.

Anyway, I though all of it was interesting and a bit revealing about Gaige Grosskreutz. He was eventually charged for this however, the DA dropped the charges less than a week before he testified in the Rittenhouse trial.

Just six days before he took the stand, Grosskreutz was before a judge himself at a hearing at which a pending DUI charge – a second offense that saw him three times over the legal limit – was dismissed on a technicality.

Grosskreutz’s attorney successfully filed a Motion to Suppress Evidence on the basis that the traffic stop from which it had been obtained had been unlawful.

Police pulled Grosskreutz over on October 6, 2020, for failure to use a signal but under Wisconsin law if there is no other vehicle present a signal is not necessary…

Had Grosskreutz’s latest DUI charge not been dismissed in such a timely manner Rittenhouse’s defense would have been allowed to question him under oath about the fact that he was on bond and the nature of his offense.

Here’s the full DUI clip. You can see the conversation with Jacob Marshall at about 6:25. The officer asks about the staring contest taking place in the ER at around 1:01:25.  And the final stare-down with one of the officers as he’s put in the squad car happens at about 2:22:00.