Jacob Blake thought he had told his children he loved them for the last time

Jacob Blake, the Black man who was shot seven times by a Kenosha police officer, said that he believed he was going to die and shared what he thought would be his final words with his children after the August shooting.

Blake, 29, was partially paralyzed in the Aug. 23 shooting that touched off days of protests and unrest in the Wisconsin city and elsewhere.

“I kind of went limp,” Blake told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in an interview that will air Thursday. “And all I remember at that point was kind of leaning back, looking at my boys. I said, ‘Daddy love you, no matter what.'”

“I thought it was going to be the last — I thought it was going to be the last thing I say to them,” he said. “Thank God it wasn’t.”

The interview comes a week after Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley announced that no police officers would be charged in the shooting.

Blake was shot seven times by Kenosha police Officer Rusten Sheskey. Some of those shots were found to have come from the back.

Sheskey was answering a domestic disturbance call at the time and officers were told Blake had a warrant for his arrest, officials said. Blake resisted arrest while armed with a knife and refused commands to drop it, the district attorney said.

Blake was shot after moving toward a “disputed car” that had at least one child in it, Graveley said. He said Blake admitted to investigators he had a knife but wasn’t sure if he’d opened it.

Jan. 5, 202101:59

Graveley said that Sheskey and other officers would have had a strong case for self-defense, and that “if you don’t believe you can prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt, you have an ethical obligation not to issue charges.”

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The shooting was captured on video and sparked protests over the summer that at times turned violent as protesters called for racial justice and police reform.

Amid the protests in Kenosha, Kyle Rittenhouse, now 18, who’d gone to Kenosha from nearby Antioch, Illinois, allegedly shot and killed two men. Rittenhouse has been criminally charged and lawyers for him have claimed that he acted in self-defense.

Blake’s shooting followed the deaths of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in May and the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville in March.