An individual sympathetic to the far-right group the Proud Boys who was criminally charged for participation in the chaos in D.C. on January 6, 2021, has now been sentenced in connection to separate criminal allegations stemming from a later violent incident. He was wearing Proud Boys iconography when entering the Capitol on that fateful day, but he reportedly denied direct connections.
The defendant, Nathan Pelham, shot at police — apparently coming very close to actually striking an officer — after he was somehow made aware of his January 6 charges. Police had showed up at all not even in direct connection to the January 6 charges but instead to conduct a welfare check. Pelham allegedly expressed ambitions to his wife of securing a scenario in which he essentially forced the police to shoot him. He was also evidently intoxicated that evening, and police eventually just left. “For their own safety, police left the property that night, and let Pelham sleep off his drinking,” a filing from his Capitol riot case said.
Pelham has been sentenced to two years of prison in connection to the firearms incident, which led to a criminal charge of unlawful possession of a firearm. He’d surrendered to local police a couple of days afterwards. In the January 6 case against him, he was eventually sentenced to time served, which followed a series of misdemeanor charges for those actions. He was among the riot participants to actually enter the Capitol building, showing up months later at a border crossing between the U.S. and Canada, per the Associated Press.
“About two months later, Pelham was stopped while attempting to enter Canada and told Border Patrol agents that he was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, court records show,” that source said. Another individual connected to the same extremist organization was recently found guilty. Gabriel Augustin Garcia, who’d been a part of a Proud Boys chapter led by the organization’s former national leader Enrique Tarrio, also entered the Capitol, live-streaming himself while inside and searching for then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
