ARKANSAS, USA: A man who beat a policeman with the American flag is now set to receive a jail sentence of up to 40 years.
41-year-old Peter Francis Stager, from Conway, was part of a group who dragged an officer down the Capitol steps in the midst of the protest on January 6th.
Stager was arrested on January 14 and is being accused of assault and other federal charges, using a ‘deadly or dangerous’ weapon to ‘forcibly assault, resist, impose, impede, intimidate and interfere with an officer’, as well as ‘obstruction of an official proceeding and aiding and abetting’.
KAIT8 reported that video materials from the attack on the Capitol seem to show Stager attacking a Washington Police officer with the flagpole.
For two of his charges, he is to receive two separate sentences of a maximum of 20 years behind bars.
The FBI was able to identify the man in the footage after two videos were shared on Twitter.
On one of them Stager can be seen talking to a reporter, saying the following:
“Everybody in there is a treasonous traitor. Death is the only remedy for what’s in that building.”
In an FBI complaint, which was cited in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Stager and others clashed with officers on the steps of the Capitol.
The affidavit reads:
“Some of these individuals were throwing and swinging various objects at the group of law enforcement officers.”
They then dragged a police officer, who was identified as ‘B.M.’ in the document, down the steps of the building:
“These individuals forced B.M. into a prone position on the stairs and proceeded to forcibly and repeatedly strike B.M. in the head and body with various objects.”
Stager was indicted alongside two other people who have been accused of assaulting officers during the riots: Jeffrey Sabol, from Colorado; and Michael John Lopatic Sr., from Pennsylvania.
The indictment states that the three accused
‘wilfully and knowingly engaged in an act of physical violence in the grounds of the U.S. Capitol building by assaulting Metropolitan Police Department officers stationed in the lower west terrace tunnel entryway to protect the U.S. Capitol building’.
A large number of people who participated in the Capitol riots are now facing serious charges in the aftermath of the madness that went down, which took the lives of 5 people. Over 250 people have been charged thus far.
