Given the attention to mass shootings, a lot of people overlooked a story that went national about a boy who was beaten by a man (not his relative) because the boy didn’t take off his hat during the national anthem. This all happened

A 13-year-old boy was attending a Montana county fair and rodeo on Saturday when he failed to remove his hat during the national anthem. Moments later, a man slammed him to the ground and fractured his skull. The boy began seizing.

The man, 39-year-old Curt James Brockway, had allegedly attacked the boy for his “disrespect,” a witness told the Missoulian. Brockway was soon arrested and charged with assault on a minor for the attack at the Mineral County Fair and Rodeo.

“He was bleeding out of his ears, seizing on the ground, just not coherent,” Taylor Hennick, a rodeo attendee, told the Missolian. As people started to surround Brockway, the man defended himself by saying the boy “was disrespecting the national anthem, so he had every right to do that,” Hennick added.

The boy was airlifted to a hospital in Spokane, Washington, where he was treated for temporal skull fractures. 

Now we learn this:

An attorney for a man who attacked a minor for wearing a hat during the national anthem so aggressively that he cracked the child’s skull said that his client thought he was acting on President Donald Trump’s orders.

Attorney Lance Jasper said that his client, Curt Brockway, has significant brain damage and took Trump’s rhetoric as guidance to slam a 13-year-old to the floor at a fairgrounds in Superior, Montana, according to the Missoulian.  

“His commander in chief is telling people that if they kneel, they should be fired, or if they burn a flag, they should be punished,” Jasper said. “He certainly didn’t understand it was a crime.”

Brockway allegedly told the teen to remove the hat while the anthem played, to which the boy responded: “fuck you,” sparking Brockway’s attack.

Brockway was allegedly severely injured in a car accident and has impaired judgment as a result.

“Trump never necessarily says go hurt somebody, but the message is absolutely clear,” Jasper said. “I am certain of the fact that [Brockway] was doing what he believed he was told to do, essentially, by the president.”