Truck plows into Native American crowd during protest

RENO, Nev. — Detectives are reviewing witness accounts and “horrifying” cellphone video while they consider filing a criminal complaint after a pickup truck plowed into a crowd of people during a Native American rights demonstration in downtown Reno, the police chief said Tuesday.

The 18-year-old male driver and a 17-year-old passenger have been questioned but no arrests have been made in Monday evening’s incident on the street beneath the arch with the city’s famous slogan, “The Biggest Little City in the World.”

A 59-year-old woman remained hospitalized Tuesday with injuries not believed life-threatening. The driver, passenger and two others were treated for minor injuries, Reno Police Chief Jason Soto said.

A Facebook Live video of the protest shows a pickup truck revving its engine in front of the crowd that had spilled onto the street in Reno’s downtown. Several protesters confronted the driver and the passenger before the truck drove through the crowd, tires squealing, at about 6:40 p.m. Monday.

Soto said the activists did not have a permit to protest in the street, but some had gathered in the travel lanes of Virginia Street on the main casino drag.

Soto said he couldn’t comment on whether the driver or passenger felt threatened by the crowd and declined to comment on whether it was being treated as a hate crime.

“We are certainly looking into all aspects of the information that comes forward,” Soto told reporters.

“I want to make a point that we are going through a lot of video,” he said, describing some of it as “very horrifying.”

Quanah Brightman, executive director of San Francisco-based United Native Americans Inc., said the group was speaking out against the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota when the truck approached.

“It was a hate crime,” she told the Reno Gazette-Journal.

One of the witnesses who posted video on Facebook Live said the two men in the pickup had been “stalking the protest” at the original site where the activists had gathered two blocks away.