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Student's Protest Met with Pepper Spray

Junior Justin Shenk kneels and prays as protestors are sprayed with pepper spray during the presidential inauguration celebration. Copyright USATODAY, January 20, 2005. Reprinted with permission.

by Robert Rhodes, Mennonite Weekly Review

WASHINGTON — Multiple blasts of pepper spray from police stung Justin Shenk as he knelt in front of Washington’s historic Willard Hotel Jan. 20. Praying silently as the motorcade of President George W. Bush passed by on Pennsylvania Avenue, Shenk was among the thousands who turned out to protest during Bush’s second inauguration.

Shenk, 21, of Akron, Pa., a junior at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va., went to Washington to peacefully protest, offering a counterpoint to far more vocal and often profane Bush opponents facing off with police that day.

Shenk and several EMU classmates were in front of the Willard with other protesters as the inaugural parade began, shortly after the swearing-in ceremony at the U.S. Capitol.

With the protesters confined behind an 8-foot-high fence, Shenk said he stepped forward as Bush’s motorcade approached, knelt and silently began to pray.

“I think they just saw someone step out from the pack” and feared a larger disruption was about to unfold, Shenk said of police Jan. 24.

This was when the first blast of pepper spray, directed at Shenk’s face and upper torso by a Washington police officer in full riot gear, rendered him temporarily blind.

More spray followed — perhaps five hits in all — as well as icy jets of water propelled by police from the other side of the fence.

Shenk, still silent despite being in considerable pain, remained kneeling.

Slowly, others decided to join him, until finally, several dozen protesters were kneeling alongside Shenk as the police continued their fusillades of riot gas and water.

Eventually, friends pulled Shenk away and offered first aid. Volunteer medics on the scene swabbed on neutralizing agents to counteract the burning spray.

Shenk’s protest, and the response of police, did not go unnoticed.

Seth Borenstein, a technology writer for Knight Ridder News Service, witnessed the confrontation and wrote about it in the Philadelphia Inquirer the next day.

“What I saw was this lone person,” Borenstein said Jan. 24. “I just watched this start to develop.”

Once the police began hitting Shenk with pepper spray, “they just kept doing it over and over again,” Borenstein said.

Though other protesters were increasingly aggressive toward police, Borenstein said Shenk was not.

“Others provoked, but not him,” Borenstein said. “He did nothing to provoke.”

Reuters news photos, reprinted by several newspapers including The New York Times and USA Today, also showed the incident — first with Shenk kneeling silently next to the fence, then with blasts of water fired from the other side of the barrier at protesters.

In one photo, EMU students Kiara Yoder of Canby, Ore., and Andile Dube of Zimbabwe hold Shenk and rinse his swollen eyes.

“The two people in the Reuters picture . . . were the face of Christ for me in this experience,” Shenk wrote in an e-mail. “Without them, well, I don’t know what would have happened if it wasn’t for them.”

After Shenk and his friends returned to Harrisonburg that night, they found news of the protest had spread quickly.

Shenk — a co-president with Yoder and another student of the EMU Peace Fellowship, and a sociology and peace studies major — said others in the EMU community have been supportive.

“It’s hard to come back and be that person in the photo,” Shenk said. “[But responses are] positive, and people are very supportive.”

Though he said there are no lingering physical effects from the pepper spray, Shenk admitted he is still processing the confrontation with police.

“There’s certainly some traumatic effects that we’re dealing with,” Shenk said.

Shenk, the son of Jim and Donna Shenk, attends Akron (Pa.) Mennonite Church.

— article by: Robert Rhodes, Mennonite Weekly Review; posted January 26, 2005