Donald Trump supporter Albuquerque Head, a Jan. 6 rioter who dragged former D.C. Police Officer Michael Fanone into the crowd on the steps of the U.S. Capitol where he was brutally assaulted, was sentenced to 7.5 years in federal prison on Thursday.
During the Jan 6 assault, Fanone suffered a traumatic brain injury and a heart attack and ended up resigning from the Metropolitan Police Department.
The former officer urged Judge Amy Berman Jackson to sentence Head to the maximum, saying that Head had cut his career in law enforcement short.
“Show him the same mercy that he showed me on Jan. 6 … which is none,” Fanone said.
Judge Jackson sentenced Head, a 43-year-old from Tennessee, to 90 months in federal prison, a bit shy of the 96 months that prosecutors had requested, but still one of the longest sentences to date in the Capitol riot cases, NBC News reports.
Head dragged Fanone into the mob on Jan. 6 while yelling “I got one!” Before that, he used a police shield to push against a line of police officers in the western-facing tunnel of the U.S. Capitol, where some of the most violent acts of the insurrection took place.
The judge called Head’s actions “some of the darkest acts committed on one of our nation’s darkest days.” She pointed out all the opportunities Head had to remove himself from the attack against police, but instead re-armed with a police shield and went back to the front line. She also described Fanone as “protecting America” during the riot.
