When Kyle Rittenhouse was arrested during the riots that took place in Kenosha, Wisconsin following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, he was charged with homicide. The reason that he got off was simple. He simply had to prove that he didn’t intend to kill his victims.

Homicide is a crime of intent. That’s why there’s a whole separate crime of negligent homicide and yet another of involuntary manslaughter.

But according to Kyle’s former spokesman, the verdict really put the “laughter” into “manslaughter” for Rittenhouse. If he’d been charged with that, he’d have faced prison.

That seems to be the opinion of Dave Hancock, who served as Rittenhouse’s legal spokesperson during the proceedings.

In a new documentary called The Trials of Kyle Rittenhouse, Hancock says directly into the camera that “I believed things he told me that I now understand to be… lies.”

During the trial four years ago, Kyle testified that he’d traveled from his home in Illinois to nearby Kenosha to “help police restore order.” He claimed that the shooting and killings of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber were done in self-defense.

Hancock, however, revealed that text messages sent by the then-teenager showed intentions of being something other than a helpful citizen.

The spokesman says that the young man had “a history of things he was doing prior to [the shootings], specifically patrolling the street for months with guns and borrowing people’s security uniforms, doing whatever he could to try to get into some kind of a fight.”

That sounds exactly like the kind of reason that the entire US military has barred him from ever applying to serve again.

But it was texts from Kyle’s cell phone that really showed his true nature. Those texts prove that he was not just spoiling for a fight. He was looking for a reason to kill someone.

In an exchange regarding some shoplifters he saw at a CVS Pharmacy a full two weeks before the incident in Kenosha, Kyle showed his true colors.

One seemingly innocuous text read “The world is disgusting. It makes me f*cking sick.” And while that sounds like some generic old man-style “get off my lawn” rhetoric, his follow-up text is anything but.

“I wish they would come into my house. I will f*cking murder them.”

And that’s the thing right there: “Murder” is definitely a choice. It is both by dictionary and legal definition impossible to “murder” someone in self-defense.

Had the jury had access to these texts, they may have found very differently.

For his part, Hancock was disappointed in what he learned. He had at first seen Kyle as a “scared kid, arrogant, oblivious to the world around him.”

“When he was telling me about the story, I believed he was being sincere,” Hancock told documentarians. “I believed things he told me that I now understand to be one of his many lies. And that hurts. That sucks.”

The Trials of Kyle Rittenhouse is an original documentary already showing on the true crime network Law & Crime, a division of the A&E Network available on most cable packages and many streaming services.