James Alex Fields Posted on Facebook as ‘Conscious Ovis Aries’ About Hitler, Trump: Reports

Albermale County Jail James Alex Fields Jr booking photo

Charlottesville car attack suspect James Alex Fields appears to have posted on a now-deleted Facebook page in the name of “Conscious Ovis Aries” that shared a Donald Trump “Make America Great Again” sign, photo of Adolf Hitler as a baby, travel pictures of a building that looks like the Reichstag in Berlin, and other incendiary materials, according to reports in Buzzfeed and The New York Daily News.

Posts on the page have Nazi references and white supremacy symbology.

Parts of the page are still visible as screenshots on a web page archival site, Heavy found, and the URL of the Facebook page was James.Fields.9279 despite the moniker used. The screenshots are in Russian and one is in Dutch, which appears to be because the people who took them were speakers of those languages on Facebook – not because “Conscious Ovis Aries” wrote in those languages. Another screenshot of Fields’ mother’s Facebook page showed “Conscious Ovis Aries” on her friend list. It’s also posted by a user speaking Russian.

Some of the graphics on the screenshot purportedly of the Conscious Ovis Aries page.

One graphic posted by the page, according to the screenshot, is titled, “Europa bleeds.” The page’s handle refers to sheep.

Facebook Archive

Some of the posts, photos, and graphics shared by the page are visible on the screenshots, however, and they do match details known about Fields’ life. The page’s posts date back at least to 2014, and, in one, a friend was tagged who is from Florence, Kentucky. The page also liked an establishment in that community; James Alex Fields is from Florence, Kentucky. In a 2015 comment thread, the page referenced getting a uniform; Fields’ mother has written on Facebook that he went to boot camp that year. According to The Guardian, Fields served in the Army from August 2015 to December 2015.

Derek Weimer, his former history teacher, said that Fields was interested in Hitler and the Nazis for years.

“A lot of boys get interested in the Germans and Nazis because they’re interested in World War II,” the Kentucky teacher said. “But James took it to another level.” He wrote a report on Hitler as a high school student that was “beyond the pale,” the teacher added.

Images from the screenshot of the Conscious Ovis Aries page.

The page also posted a check in at an Ohio establishment; Fields moved to Ohio, where he lived with his mother, Samantha Bloom, according to Cincinnati.com and many other news reports. One photo shows a man who resembles Fields standing with a car that resembles the one authorities accuse Fields, 20, of using to ram into a crowd of counter protesters who had assembled against a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. However, one car has hood stripes, and the other does not.

Here’s a photo from the scene of the car ramming:

GettyThe car that allegedly plowed through a crowd of protestors marching through a downtown shopping district is seen after the vehicle was stopped by police several blocks away.

The page’s profile picture is a cat.

Here’s the photo montage that includes a well-known photo of baby Hitler.

Facebook

Here’s the drawing that resembles Trump:

Witnesses said the car ramming appeared to be intentional, and some, including Republican Senator Ted Cruz, are calling for a domestic terrorism prosecution. The FBI has opened a civil rights investigation, and Fields is in custody on murder and other charges. A 32-year-old woman, Heather Heyer, died in the car ramming attack and 19 people were injured, CNN reported. President Trump condemned the attack and violence on “many sides,” which has led to widespread condemnation over his failure to call out white nationalists by name or to label the car ramming attack domestic terrorism. The white nationalist rally, which led to other clashes at the scene, was held in Charlottesville because white supremacists are angry about the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in the city.

Getty

GettyRescue workers and medics tend to many people who were injured when a car plowed through a crowd of anti-facist counter-demonstrators marching through the downtown shopping district August 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. The car plowed through the crowed following the shutdown of the “Unite the Right” rally by police after white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the “alt-right” and counter-protesters clashed near Lee Park, where a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee is slated to be removed.

Fields is being held “on suspicion of second-degree murder, malicious wounding and failure to stop in an accident that resulted in death,” according to CNN. Toledo Blade reported that Fields’ mother, Samantha Bloom, said she received a text from him that he was going to an “alt-right rally in Virginia.”

She told The Blade: “I thought it had something to do with [President] Trump. I try to stay out of his political views. I don’t get too involved.”

Heavy has reached out to multiple tagged friends on the page as well as relatives of Fields in an attempt to definitively confirm whether the page was his.

Buzzfeed reported that the page was “apparently” Fields’, and The Daily News reported that it was his page without explaining the verification process to get there. However, many other media outlets have not yet reported on the page. Buzzfeed reported, “On a Facebook page that appears to belong to Fields, photos included memes embraced by the alt right and some supporters of President Donald Trump, including Pepe the Frog and a portrait of a crowned Trump sitting on a throne.” Those images appear on the archived screenshots.

According to Buzzfeed, “The angular symbol in one image was identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as the Othala rune, a Norse symbol that was co-opted by the Nazis to promote their ideas of racial ‘purity.’ Another image shows a character from the animated series Archer, who is raised by a Nazi scientist and suggested to be a clone of Hitler.”

Daily News posted similar images.