John Fetterman, Lt. Governor of Pennsylvania, now running for Senate! FANTASTIC!!

[Celerity]

12. I am not buying into your FUD post attempt at a hatchet job on a great Dem. The NYT's article

clears up everything to a more than sufficient extent for me.

In 2013, when he was mayor, Mr. Fetterman used his shotgun to stop an unarmed Black jogger and detain him, telling the police that he had heard shots fired near his home and spotted the man running, according to the police report. “Fetterman continued to yell and state that he knows this male was shooting,” the police report says. Two other people told police they had heard several shots as well. An officer who patted down the man, Christopher Miyares, then 28, found no weapons. The officer noted that Mr. Miyares was wearing running clothes and headphones. Mr. Miyares was released. On Tuesday, in response to questions from The Times, Mr. Fetterman’s campaign shared a new two-and-a-half minute video in which the candidate described the incident and defended himself — a sign that his campaign anticipated that the events from eight years ago would resurface with potential political fallout for his Senate bid. In the video, Mr. Fetterman says that he was outside his home with his 4-year-old son when he heard “this crushing burst of gunfire,” and “I immediately made a series of split-second decisions.” He said he saw someone “dressed entirely in black and a face mask” running in the direction of an elementary school.

Noting that the date, in January 2013, was not long after the Sandy Hook school shooting, Mr. Fetterman said, “I made the decision to stop him from going any further until the first responders could arrive.” According to accounts Mr. Fetterman gave in 2013 to local media, he chased the man in his pickup truck and used a 20-gauge shotgun he kept in the truck to hold him until the police appeared. “I believe I did the right thing,” Mr. Fetterman told WTAE-TV at the time. “But I may have broken the law in the course of it. I’m certainly not above the law.” Mr. Miyares told the TV station in 2013 that Mr. Fetterman had pointed the gun at his chest; the mayor denied doing so. Mr. Miyares said the incident unnerved him, and he maintained that what Mr. Fetterman took to be gunshots were bottle rockets set off by a group of kids. Mr. Fetterman said no traces of fireworks were found in the area.

No charges related to the incident were brought against Mr. Fetterman, who was in his second of four terms as mayor. A search of public court records did not find any complaint or action taken by Mr. Miyares following the incident. A spokesman for the Allegheny County Police Department said on Tuesday that Mr. Miyares never filed a complaint with the department.

In 2018, Mr. Miyares was charged with multiple felonies in a separate incident, including kidnapping for ransom, making terroristic threats and reckless endangerment, according to publicly available court records. He is currently incarcerated in state prison in Somerset County, Pa., and could not be reached for comment. Mr. Fetterman’s run-in with Mr. Miyares surfaced briefly in 2016 during an earlier Senate bid by Mr. Fetterman, when he ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary. At the time, he told The Philly Voice that his pursuit and detainment of the runner had nothing to do with race. “The runner could have been my mother for all I knew, thanks to what the jogger was wearing,” he said. In his statement released along with the video, Mr. Fetterman said the incident with the jogger had been spread by political opponents since 2015 “and it’s never gone anywhere because people here know that I did the right thing for my community.”

Most recently, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully last year for a House seat from western Pennsylvania, Sean Parnell, tweeted about the incident in July 2020. Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son, retweeted Mr. Parnell. “I’m not going to just sit here while a bunch of Republicans who have never given a damn about racial justice launch these bad-faith attacks from the safety of their gated communities,” Mr. Fetterman said in his statement. “They’ve never had stray bullets hit their home, or had a bullet whiz by so close that you can feel the air move. When I ran for mayor, I made a commitment to do whatever I could to confront this gun violence — and that’s exactly what I’ve done.” He noted that he was re-elected in 2013 by voters in Braddock, which is 80 percent Black.