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WASHINGTON – Federal authorities in Michigan have arrested a man on suspicion of using a hockey stick to repeatedly beat police officers during the Jan.6 riot on Capitol Hill – including beating one who had already fallen to the ground.
Like others who have been arrested in connection with the riots, the man, Michael Joseph Foy, has been charged with obstructing parliamentary proceedings and illegally entering a restricted-access building. But he also faces other more serious charges, including the forcible assault of a federal officer, making him the latest of a growing number of suspects accused of assaulting police officers.
According to an FBI affidavit released Thursday, investigators have identified numerous social media riot videos and photographs in which Mr. Foy appeared, including footage of violence against police compiled and published by The New York Times .
Another video, posted on YouTube, appears to show Mr. Foy “lifting the stick over his head and quickly swinging it down, hitting an individual to the ground several times,” the affidavit states. “At no point does it appear that the individual on the ground is acting aggressively, nor does it appear that the attack was ‘justified’.
The victim – apparently a police officer – has not been identified in the court file.
The FBI identified Mr. Foy using posts on his father’s Facebook page; among other things, his father wrote, discussing a photo of his son during the riot, “he was better brought up,” according to the affidavit. Other articles about Mr. Foy cited in the complaint indicate that he is a former member of the Marine Corps.
Mr. Foy is one of the many people arrested in recent days and accused of assaulting police officers during filmed assaults. Prosecutors this week charged Connecticut man Patrick E. McCaughey with trapping police officer Daniel Hodges behind a riot shield as a crowd pressed against him. In a widely viewed video of the incident, Constable Hodges screamed for help in pain until he was finally brought to safety.
On Tuesday, the FBI accused Mathew Capsel, whose condition has not been identified in an affidavit, of being a tattooed rioter seen in a video fighting against National Guards until he was sprayed with pepper. The video, posted on TikTok, depicts him “charging against an aligned group” of guards and “running in their protective shields,” the affidavit reads.
A man who surrendered to authorities on Monday, Emanuel Jackson, faces five federal charges, including assaulting an officer with a deadly weapon. He is accused of being the person who, in a video, is seen “punching and repeatedly hitting” a policeman who was trying to hold back a crowd that was coming through the windows and doors of the Capitol in start of the riot, according to a complaint. Two hours later, he says, he was caught on video using a metal baseball bat to hit a row of officers holding perspex shields.
A law enforcement affidavit filed against another indicted man this week, Vitali Gossjankowski of Florida, suggests he may have used a Taser on a police officer who suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized, but didn’t was not directly accused of the assault.
The affidavit stated that a person who looked like Mr. Gossjankowski was caught on camera activating a Taser and walking towards a location where the officer had been knocked repeatedly in the neck. Mr. Gossjankowski, said the affidavit, admitted that he had had a Taser, but claimed he had just found it and had not used it to attack the officer, saying that “if he did was touching, he was touching his helmet and it was just to help him. “
Authorities in Texas arrested Ryan Taylor Nichols on Monday, accusing him of being a rioter on camera taking a red pepper spray canister and using it on a federal law enforcement officer attempting to ‘prevent crowds from entering the Capitol.
And last week, Arkansas’ Peter Francis Stager was charged with obstructing law enforcement after officials identified him as the person waving a pole with an American flag attached to ” repeatedly hit “an officer who” remained inclined “on the steps of the Capitol. , according to a criminal complaint. The episode was widely seen on social media videos.
“Everyone in there is a traitorous traitor,” Mr. Stager said in an apparent reference to the Capitol, according to a video obtained by the FBI. “Death is the only cure for what’s in this building.
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