CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Eric Sherry’s worst nightmare was about 200 steps away.
McIntyre Park was just through his office door and down the stairs. A short walk between the tennis courts, over the old wooden bridge and past the English Ivy stood the displaced attendees of Unite the Right, a rally that brought neo-Nazi idealists and other racially motivated protesters to the same cut-through space his football team used to walk to practice.
It was August 12—the 50th birthday for Sherry, football coach at Charlottesville High—when a civil rights activist named Heather Hayer was murdered by a white supremacist who rammed counter-protestors with his Dodge Challenger downtown.