UCLA police on Thursday arrested a pro-Israel counterprotester for his role in the violent April 30 attack on a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus, the first such arrest made in relation to the incident.
Edan On, 18, was detained in Beverly Hills and booked on Thursday into the Los Angeles County Jail on suspicion of felony assault with a deadly weapon, according to police and jail records. He was held on $30,000 bail.
On was identified by CNN last week as one of the attackers. He is not a student but a local high-school senior, his mother told CNN, though she later denied he was at the protest at all.
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His mother initially confirmed to CNN that On was the man seen in footage of the attack wearing a white hoodie and brandishing a pole, which he used to beat a pro-Palestinian protester and continue bludgeoning even as the protester went down.
“Edan went to bully the Palestinian students in the tents at UCLA and played the song that they played to the Nukhba terrorists in prison!” his mother proudly wrote on Facebook in a since-deleted post, accompanied by a screenshot of news footage from a local station. In the post, she identified her son by circling his figure in the screenshot of the news feed, CNN reported.
The violence at UCLA sparked intense scrutiny of the university and the police, as observers wondered how campus security could have let counterprotesters set off fireworks, and beat and bloody students for hours before intervening. The attack prompted an independent review of the university’s actions and of law enforcement’s handling of it, and last week, UCLA chancellor Gene Block was put on blast by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) during a congressional hearing for “allowing” the violence to happen on his watch.
For weeks, pro-Palestinian supporters criticized law enforcement for making no arrests of counterprotesters. Now that one has been made, more may follow.
