The truck driver who attacked a police officer with a flagpole on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was sentenced on Monday to 52 months in federal jail.
The assault by the driving force, Peter Stager, produced one of the vital disturbing pictures because the assault on the Capitol. Steiger, 44, of Conway, Arkansas, was filmed beating Officer Blake Miller with a flagpole in a match of rage as Officer Miller lay face down in a crowd of different rioters, “having no technique of defending himself,” prosecutors wrote in courtroom paperwork.
Mr. Steiger was certainly one of 9 individuals charged with assaulting Officer Miller and two of his colleagues, Officers Carter Moore and Andrew Waite, in a 90-second sequence of violence that unfolded on the steps close to the tunnel on the Capitol’s Decrease West Terrace. The officers who fell sufferer to assaults within the tunnel on the terrace and on the steps repeatedly in contrast the violence to the hand-to-hand fight of a medieval battle.
After the assault on Officer Miller, Mr. Stager was filmed pointing on the Capitol and stating, “The whole lot there’s a disgrace, prosecutors stated. This complete constructing is stuffed with traitorous traitors. Loss of life is the one treatment for what’s on this constructing.
He went on to say, “To every of those Capitol regulation enforcement officers, loss of life is the treatment. It is the one treatment they get.”
In courtroom paperwork filed earlier than the decision within the Federal District Courtroom in Washington, Mr. Stager’s attorneys instructed Decide Rudolph Contreras that their shopper, like most of the Jan. 6 defendants, had a traumatic childhood. Legal professionals wrote that within the early years of his life, Mr. Stager was homeless, sleeping underneath benches in California and stealing meals from retailers and trash cans.
After Mr. Stager’s mom left him and his siblings when he was about 6 years previous, his attorneys say he was positioned in a foster residence.
Legal professionals instructed Decide Contreras that Mr. Stager was in Washington on Jan. 6 solely due to a scheduling battle together with his trucking firm’s dispatch division. Because the attorneys wrote, after delivering a batch of groceries to a vacation spot close to Washington, he determined to not return to Arkansas with an empty truck, realizing that he wouldn’t earn cash and he must pay for gas.
As an alternative, attorneys say, Mr. Stager “determined to benefit from the scenario” and attend President Donald J. Trump’s rally on the Ellipse in Washington on the morning of January 6.
“This choice is a call that Mr. Stager will remorse for the remainder of his life,” the attorneys wrote.
As the gang moved from Trump’s White Home speech to the Capitol and have become extra aggressive, “Mr. Stager’s emotional state was in turmoil,” his attorneys wrote. Lastly, “seeing pink,” as they stated, he picked up the flagpole that was on the bottom and adopted Officer Miller.
Mr. Steiger apologized to the officer in a letter submitted with an announcement from his lawyer, saying he “has no hatred for regulation enforcement, not to mention anybody.”
Three of Mr. Stager’s co-defendants — Justin Jersey, Logan Barnhart and Mason Courson — had been additionally convicted on assault costs. Every was sentenced to between three and 5 years in jail, a comparatively modest sentence for circumstances involving assaults on police.
Different rioters convicted of assaulting officers obtained a number of the heaviest sentences of the greater than 1,000 individuals charged in reference to the assault on the Capitol.
A Pennsylvania welder who attacked officers with a chair after which used a chemical spray was sentenced in Might to greater than 14 years in jail. The next month, a California man was sentenced to greater than 12 years in jail for stabbing officer Michael Fanon twice within the neck with a stun gun.
