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Kenosha Shooting Victim Jacob Blake Grew Up In Winston-Salem

A protester attempts to continue standing through a cloud of tear gas fired by police outside the Kenosha County Courthouse, late Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, in Kenosha, Wis. Protesters converged on the county courthouse during a second night of clashes after the police shooting of Jacob Blake a day earlier turned Kenosha into the nation's latest flashpoint city in a summer of racial unrest. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

A man whose shooting by police in Wisconsin has sparked national outrage was raised in Winston-Salem. 

A bystander captured cellphone video of the shooting of 29-year-old Jacob Blake Sunday in Kenosha, a town of about 100,000 people. It comes three months after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police led to protests that swept the country.

Blake's father tells the Chicago Sun-Times that his son grew up in Winston-Salem, where he described him as a “happy little dude.” In middle school, he moved to Evanston, Illinois.

Blake's father, also named Jacob, says his son comes from a large family and has six children of his own.

The elder Blake says his son is paralyzed from the waist down and had eight holes in his body. He didn't know if the paralysis would be permanent.

Kenosha police have not said why they opened fire.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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