Nichelle, who was also in Charlottesville that day, remembers the hate. “White people made me feel like this is their world and that I don’t belong,” she said.

Long stuck around in the park—the initial focal point of the protests—to help support his friends. At noon, law enforcement declared the rally an unlawful assembly. Shortly after that, Long and a group of counterprotesters found themselves trading barbs with white nationalists, many of whom were in white polo shirts and were exiting the park. In what he described as a reflex, Long pulled out a lighter and turned the aerosol can that had been thrown at him into a flamethrower, pushing back a man wielding a Confederate flag.

“It was all so quick,” Long said. “I was trying to protect myself and others from these neo-Nazis.”

Frank Buck was there, too. The attorney and former mayor was curious about the disconcerting images from the night prior, when men with torches marched across the University of Virginia’s campus. With his office two blocks away from the Robert E. Lee statue that was at the center of the initial dispute, Buck, who served as mayor from 1980 to 1988, found himself with counterprotesters at one of the exits where people were filing out of the park. About 10 feet away from him was Richard Preston, an alleged Ku Klux Klan leader from Baltimore, who came charging in with a pistol after seeing Long’s flames. In a video of the incident, Preston, wearing a blue cutoff underneath a tactical vest, can be heard yelling, “Hey, nigger!” Buck said he clearly heard someone in the crowd, just a couple of seconds earlier, say “Kill the nigger,” in reference to Long.

“Preston pulled his gun out and aimed it across from where I was, which caused me to look at where he was pointing his gun—and that’s when I first saw Corey Long,” Buck said. “I thought Corey Long was going to be killed. I was a little bit in shock.”

Preston spit out a five-word question before pulling the trigger on a gun that, Buck said, was originally pointed at Long’s chest: “You wanna be that way?”

Preston ripped his shot, and the bullet landed close to Long’s feet, causing a puff of mulch and leaves to pop up. In May, Preston was found guilty of firing a gun near a school. Preston is currently at Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail and is next scheduled in court on October 12.

“I’ve thought about how he really tried to kill me,” Long told me. “It was unreal. He really tried to take my life.” He later added: “I want to live a normal life.”

Steve Helber, a photographer for the Associated Press, was standing in the park around noon, a few feet away from Long. When he saw the flames, Helber pulled out his camera and took three or four frames, hoping to capture something. There was no time to think. What came from it was an imperfect photo—too wide of a frame, not exposed properly—that captured an extraordinary moment. “People can take all sorts of different meanings from it, and I have no control over that,” said Helber, who has worked in the AP’s bureau in Richmond, Virginia, for 37 years. “I was surprised how much attention it did get and how it was used.”