The U.S. Navy seaman who created an internet buzz claiming he was stabbed by someone who called him a “neo-Nazi” because of his haircut has been charged with false reporting, the Denver Post reported Monday.
As Breitbart News reported last Sunday, Joshua Witt, 26, gave a harrowing account of being stabbed in a Colorado parking lot to the New York Post in the aftermath of this month’s violence-strewn “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA.
“All I hear is, ‘Are you one of them neo-Nazis?’ as this dude is swinging a knife up over my car door at me,” Witt told the New York Post. “I threw my hands up and once the knife kind of hit, I dived back into my car and shut the door and watched him run off west, behind my car.”
“[So] apparently I look like a neo-nazi and got stabbed for it … luckily I put my hands up to stop it so he only stabbed my hand…. please keep in mind there was no conversation between me and this dude I was literally just getting out of my car,” Witt said in a Facebook post that quickly went viral in a public sphere on edge over swelling political violence.
Police in Sheridan, CO, the Denver suburb where Witt claimed he was stabbed while on leave from his San Diego station, are convinced the story is fiction. According to the Denver Post, reviewing surveillance video revealed no assailants in the area. The other shoe dropped when video from a sporting goods store near the supposed site of the crime showed Boatswain’s Mate Witt buying a knife. Witt later admitted to police that he’d accidentally cut himself.
In a country in the midst of an actual wave of political violence, including by the Antifa activists Witt appears to have been trying to implicate, the alleged hoax got perhaps more attention than Witt would have liked. He is now facing a maximum of one year in jail and a fine of up to $2,650.