The US man charged with killing a woman at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville has previously been accused of beating his mother and threatening her with a knife, according to police records.
James Alex Fields Jr, 20, has been charged with second-degree murder and other counts for ramming his car into a crowd of counter-protesters on Saturday, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
Police records released on Monday show his mother, Samantha Bloom, who has a disability and uses a wheelchair, repeatedly called police about her son in 2010 and 2011, telling officers he was on medication to control his temper, transcripts from emergency hotline 911 show.
A judge denied Fields, described by a former high school teacher as an admirer of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, bail on Monday after the public defender's office said it couldn't represent him because a relative of someone in the office was injured in Saturday's protest.
Fields was assigned a local lawyer, and another hearing was set for August 25.
Records show that Fields was arrested and put in juvenile detention after his mother reported in 2011 that he stood behind her wielding a 30 centimetre knife.
In another incident in 2010, she said her son smacked her in the head and locked her in the bathroom after she told him to stop playing video games. There was no indication in the records that he was arrested.
A former classmate of Fields told The Associated Press on Monday that on a school trip to Europe in 2015, Fields had said he couldn't stand the French and said he only went on the trip so that he could visit "the Fatherland" - Germany.
"He just really laid on about the French being lower than us and inferior to us," said Keegan McGrath.
McGrath, now 18, said he challenged Fields on his beliefs, and the animosity between them grew so heated that it boiled over at dinner on their second day. He said he went home after three or four days because he couldn't handle being in a room with Fields.
Meanwhile, under pressure to speak out more forcefully, US President Donald Trump condemned Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis and white supremacists who take part in violence as "criminals and thugs" and declared that "racism is evil."
Trump's initial failure to denounce the groups by name, and his blaming of the violence on "many sides," prompted criticism from fellow Republicans as well as Democrats.
