An individual involved with the far-right organization the Proud Boys who was at least an associate of the group’s former and now criminally convicted national leader Enrique Tarrio has himself been convicted on Capitol riot charges in court in D.C. The defendant is a Florida man named Gabriel Augustin Garcia.
He was specifically convicted of obstruction of an official proceeding and interference with law enforcement during a civil disorder. Though he participated in pre-January 6 discussions with others involved in his extremist organization, he was evidently left out of the seditious conspiracy charges leveled against Tarrio and others. The local Proud Boys chapter in which Garcia participated was led by Tarrio.
Garcia was, compared to others in the Proud Boys, a later arrival to the actual Capitol complex, but he eventually entered the building itself not long after its initial breach. He harassed police officers and sought then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat whose name he ominously chanted while roaming inside.
Notably, he also live-streamed some of his activities that day to Facebook, no doubt later boosting the federal criminal case brought against him. In the lead-up to the violence, Garcia messaged a group conversation of Proud Boys participants with evident intentions towards physical violence, writing it was “time to stack those bodies in front of Capitol Hill.”
His harassment of officers included referring to the police as traitors for trying to stop the violent incursion across the Capitol complex. The obstruction charge alone comes with a widely reported sentence if convicted of up to 20 years, though it’s unclear he’ll actually face something close to that length of prison, especially considering he was excluded from the sedition allegations. His sentencing is currently scheduled for March of next year, more than three years after his initial arrest in early 2021 and the same month that Trump is scheduled for trial on January 6-related allegations from Jack Smith.
