Dan O’Donnell is a conservative radio host at 1130 WISN in Milwaukee. Today, Dan reported that he had identified the person known has “Jump-Kick Man” in the Rittenhouse trial. In case you haven’t been watching the trial obsessively, after Rittenhouse shot Joseph Rosenbaum he began running down the street toward the police where he planned to turn himself in. But he was chased by a mob of people, some of whom attacked him.

After being hit in the head with concrete and having a skateboard swung at him by Anthony Huber, Rittenhouse fell in the street and while he was down a man jumped over him and kicked him in the face. He was never identified and so during the trial everyone referred to him as Jump-Kick Man. Dan O’Donnell says he knows who he is but isn’t revealing his name because he was never charged with a crime. But he does reveal his many prior run ins with law enforcement which go back two decades.

“The Dan O’Donnell Show” can now report exclusively that Jump Kick Man is a 40-year-old Black male from Kenosha with an extensive criminal record who was at the time of the Rittenhouse shootings on probation following a conviction for domestic violence battery. He faced a maximum sentence of nine months in jail, but less than two months before he kicked Rittenhouse, he accepted a plea deal that netted him 12 months’ probation. The following year, he violated the terms of his probation and was sentenced to seven months in jail…

“The Dan O’Donnell Show” is not naming Jump Kick Man, as he has not been criminally charged in connection with the Rittenhouse case. Sources indicate that he contacted prosecutors and offered to testify, but in exchange requested immunity from an ongoing drunk driving and domestic abuse case with which he was charged in June. Prosecutors declined his offer and chose not to call him as a witness in the Rittenhouse case.

According to online court records, Jump Kick Man has a criminal record that dates back more than two decades, with multiple felony convictions for car theft, ID theft, drug possession, and escaping custody. Given this and a recent prior conviction for misdemeanor battery (and a subsequent probation revocation), Jump Kick Man should have been sentenced to at least some jail time following his most recent conviction…

Jump Kick Man had been sentenced to probation in three different cases and violated the terms of that probation every single time. Still, a judge last June sentenced him to probation yet again…and yet again he violated the terms of that probation earlier this year.

O’Donnell argues that if Jump-Kick Man hadn’t been there that night, Anthony Huber might not have felt emboldened to attack Rittenhouse a second time and if he hadn’t done that he wouldn’t have been shot. And if Huber hadn’t been shot, Gaige Grosskreutz might also have kept his distance and he wouldn’t have been shot either. Effectively, he’s arguing that the judge who released Jump-Kick Man on probation just two months before the incident instead of putting him in jail is the reason things turned out as they did that night.

I’m not sure I buy that argument but it’s somewhat plausible. Huber had run to get his skateboard after it went flying across the street the first time he swung it as Rittenhouse. That meant he had to close some distance to get back into range to try again. He likely couldn’t have done that if Jump-Kick Man wasn’t keeping Rittenhouse occupied for a few seconds. Maybe they all would have backed off and let Rittenhouse continue to the police. We’ll obviously never know.

But one thing I do think we can say is that Rittenhouse is very lucky that the two shots he fired at Jump-Kick Man missed. As it is, people have been desperate to introduce a racial angle to this trial despite the fact that everyone he shot was white. If one of the victims had been black, that would have been the main focus of the media’s attention. It would have reinforced the claims that Rittenhouse was a white supremacist vigilante. As bad as the coverage of this case has been, it would have been far worse if he’d shot Jump-Kick Man.