"We avoided killing him," says Patrick Hutchinson, the black protagonist of an image taken last Saturday in anti-racist protests in London and others called by far-right groups that has gone viral as an unusually supportive gesture in a polarized society. In the photo he is seen carrying a white man. Hutchinson says he did it to protect him, because he was wounded. "The situation was not going to end well," he assured the BBC. For this reason, he explained, "I picked it up, loaded it firefighter-style and got it out of there."
Hutchinson had gone with a group of friends to a demonstration for the anti-racist cause, framed in the wave of global protests by police brutality in the case of George Floyd, when they saw an altercation near the Waterloo bridge, on the south bank of the Thames. "The guy ended up on the ground and they [referring to his friends] rushed to avoid being trampled on," said the protagonist of the image, physical trainer.
"By doing that, they created a barrier around him and I was the last to arrive. I picked him up, carried him, and took him out of there with the others surrounding me, protecting and shielding me, and defending this man so that he would not receive more punishment" , has detailed to the BBC.
"What I wanted was to avoid a catastrophe, not to change the slogan 'black lives matter' at once by 'young people kill protesters'. That was the message we were trying to avoid," he told CNN.
Neither television network has identified the man who saved Hutchinson, nor if he was part of the far-right groups that gathered on Saturday to boycott anti-racist protests in clashes that resulted in more than a hundred detainees by violent disorders, attacks on authority or possession of weapons. Police arrested a 28-year-old man who, according to a photograph, appeared to urinate on a monument in memory of an agent who died defending Parliament from a terrorist attack in 2017.
The image has sparked numerous congratulatory comments for Hutchinson. "I want there to be equality for everyone. I am a father and a grandfather and I would like to see my children, my grandchildren and my nephews in a better world than the one I have lived in," he said. A world that, he says, "is better than the one in which his parents and grandparents lived."
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