A young assistant district attorney was so swamped with cases that she didn’t bother looking at a pretrial risk assessment and set Darrell Brooks bail at just $1,000 days before the Waukesha Christmas parade attack. Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm said Thursday that the assistant DA had been on the job for two-and-a-half years and was handling a huge caseload. She saw that Brooks’ bail had been set at $500 in a pending case for allegedly firing a gun at his nephew, so she simply doubled it. Brooks’ trial on the endangerment charge had been delayed due to a pandemic backlog, so his bail had been reduced from $7,500 to $500 because he wasn’t afforded his right to a speedy trial.

“That’s human error,” Chisholm said. “It set in motion a chain of events that resulted in a tragedy. Again, I’m not trying to lessen our responsibility for that, but that’s it. In essence, that’s what you had here, a young ADA trying to do the best she could under tough circumstances and she made a mistake.”