MULTIPLE VIDEOS: Man shot as Albuquerque protesters clash in tense exchange over tearing down local statue

A tense exchange erupted in gunfire last night in New Mexico during attempts by protesters to tear down a statue of Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate in front of the Albuquerque Museum.

I’ve been looking for videos of the incident to try and get the real story. It appears a man in a blue shirt, who was trying to protect a statue and was physical with protesters in the process, was eventually pushed away from the statue by angry protesters and ganged up on, even tackled on the street at one point. He appeared to pull out a gun to defend himself and ended up shooting one of his attackers.

Just to give you an idea of what was going on, here are the protesters trying to pull down the statue as the shooting takes place in the background. The sounds of gunfire happen at the very end:

 
Earlier the man in the blue shirt appears next to the statue, along with the New Mexico Civil Guard, getting physical with protesters as he appeared to be trying to protect the statue:

 
Here’s another video of the man in the blue shirt being physically blocked by one woman as he tried to get to the statue. He just jerked her to the ground:

 
With that as what little background I could find, here you see the angry protesters driving the man in the blue shirt away from the statue. He reportedly used pepper spray to keep them away. You then see a couple protesters tackling him to the ground after he appeared to be leaving. That’s when he pulled out a gun and shot one of them to stop his attackers:

 
Here’s another angle:

 
Someone slowed the video down by 75% so you can see much better what the man and the blue shirt was dealing with as he was tackled:

 
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, it appears that New Mexico Civil Guard members tried to restore order and kicked the man’s gun away from him as he sat on the pavement:

 
Here’s video of the man who was shot getting attention from an onsite medic. Ignore the caption as I don’t think it’s accurate:

 
And here’s the ambulance taking the wounded man away:

 
There are a few tweets alleging that these protesters may have been Antifa, but I don’t know that for sure. What I do know is that the police are investigating and the city has already removed the statue this morning:


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