Albuquerque Head
A Tennessee man was sentenced on Thursday to seven and a half years in prison for dragging a police officer protecting the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, into an angry pro-Trump crowd that brutally assaulted the officer.
The man, Albuquerque Cosper Head, pleaded guilty in March to assaulting the officer, Michael Fanone, who has emerged as an outspoken advocate for the officers who were subjected to the mob violence on Jan. 6. The sentence was one of the most severe penalties handed down so far in the Justice Department’s investigation of the Capitol attack.
As part of his plea, Mr. Head, a 43-year-old construction worker, admitted that during the violence outside the Capitol, he grabbed Mr. Fanone around the neck and told the crowd around him, “I got one!” Mr. Head then forcibly hauled Mr. Fanone down the Capitol steps and into the mob, where he was beaten, kicked and attacked with a stun gun.
Head restrained Fanone while other rioters beat and shocked the officer with a stun gun at the base of his skull. Fanone lost consciousness during the assault, which his body camera captured on video.
Metropolitan Police Department Officer Michael Fanone was on the front lines of the battle for control of the tunnel entrance when Head grabbed him. Head yelled “I’ve got one!” as he wrapped his arms around Fanone’s neck and dragged him into the crowd outside the tunnel, prosecutors said. “He was your prey. He was your trophy,” U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson (Obama) told Head, 43.
“The dark shadow of tyranny unfortunately has not gone away,” Jackson said. “There are people who are still disseminating the lie that the election was stolen. They’re doing it today. And the people who are stoking that anger for their own selfish purposes, they need to think about the havoc they’ve wreaked, the lives they’ve ruined.”
