Democratic Jacksonville Councilwoman Who Defended DeSantis at Shooting Vigil Says He Wasn’t Invited but Crowd Shouldn’t Have Booed

When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) appeared at a vigil for the victims and community of the racially-motivated mass shooting in Jacksonville, he was not well-received. He was audibly booed by the crowd until Democratic Councilwoman Ju’Coby Pittman stood up for him, telling everyone, “It’s ain’t about parties today.” On Monday, Pittman gave CNN more details about DeSantis’ appearance and revealed that the governor wasn’t actually invited.

Speaking to CNN’s Boris Sanchez, Pittman explained that days after a White gunman murdered three Black shoppers at a Jacksonville Dollar General, the hate crime “has crippled and handcuffed our community. And families are hurting. You know, they’re heartbroken. Our community is heartbroken as well.”

But when asked about DeSantis, Pittman was eager to make it very clear that despite his taking the mic, this event was not meant to be about him. In fact, she didn’t know he was going to be there, let alone speak:

I had no idea that the governor was coming. The emcee of the event for that day called him up. He was just only was supposed to have been acknowledged as being there. That vigil that we did yesterday was was not about the governor. And I will say I don’t support any of the stances or policies that the governor has implemented. You know, my concern yesterday was about the families. It was not a political ploy for me and our community. It was about focusing on the families that was there and the hatred that had come to their community. And so I just want to make myself clear, I wanted the audience to calm down because I wanted him to sit down and I wanted it to be the event that was for the residents and the community that had come together for unity. That’s what that event was about, not the governor.

DeSantis called the shooter, who turned the gun on himself, a “scumbag,” and pledged $1 million in funds for security at Edward Waters University, a HBCU that the gunman initially approached before the shooting at the Dollar General.

Nonetheless, some critics have said that DeSantis’ “war on woke” has spread the rhetoric that led to this crime; Florida State Rep. Angie Nixon (D) said DeSantis had “blood on his hands” when details of the shooter’s white supremacist beliefs came to light:

This is a governor who has done nothing but fan these types of happenings throughout our state. Look, at the end of the day, the governor has blood on his hands. He has had an attack, an all-out attack, on the black community with his anti-woke policies, which we know very well was nothing more than a dog whistle to get folks up and riled up in the way in which it just happened yesterday.

Watch the video above via CNN.