Jan. 6 Rioter Who Dragged a Police Officer Into the Crowd Gets 7.5 Years in Prison

Officer Michael Fanone suffered a heart attack and received a traumatic brain injury from the attack.

hoto By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

On Thursday, a US District Court judge sentenced a January 6 rioter to seven years and six months in prison for dragging DC police Officer Michael Fanone into the angry mob at the Capitol, an act that resulted in one of the most brutal attacks that day. Albuquerque Cosper Head, a 34-year old man from Tennessee, was responsible for forcibly moving Fanone from a tunnel into a crowd of angry rioters who proceeded to beat him and shocked him with a stun gun at the base of his skull. 

Before sentencing, Judge Amy Berman Jackson told Head, “He was your prey. He was your trophy.” Head, who declined to address the court,  is one of the hundreds of Trump supporters charged for their roles in storming the Capitol in a violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. 

The ex-construction worker, who pled guilty in April, has received one of the longest sentences of the convicted insurrectionists so far, second only to an ex-NYPD officer who was given nearly ten years last month. Head’s sentence is only six months shy of the maximum eight years for these charges. 

The details of the attack are shocking. According to prosecutors, Head yelled “I got one!” before grabbing Fanone around his neck and dragging him before the crowd. Head then held the officer in place as the crowd proceeded to beat and taze him repeatedly, leaving burn marks at the base of his neck. Body camera footage captured Fanone losing consciousness for more than two minutes during the assault. Court records also state that Head attempted to remove Fanone’s weapon from its holster. 

The former officer recounted the details of this attack during his testimony at the first congressional hearing during the January 6 investigation. As my colleague, Inae Oh, previously reported

“I was grabbed, beaten, tased, all while being called a traitor to my country,” Officer Michael Fanone told lawmakers in his opening statement. “I was at risk of being stripped of and killed with my own firearm as I heard chants of ‘Kill him with his own gun.’ I can still hear those words in my head.”

During the sentencing hearing, Fanone said that he suffered a heart attack and sustained a traumatic brain injury from the attack, ending his career in law enforcement. While he’s gained some fame from his testimony and even secured a book deal, he said he still misses the life he had before. 

“I would trade all of this attention to return to policing, but I can’t do that,” he said, according to reports from the LA Times. “And the catalyst for my loss of career and the suffering that I’ve endured in the past 18 months is Albuquerque Head.”

There are more than 900 people who’ve been federally charged for their actions on January 6. Donald Trump and his former chief of staff were both recently subpoenaed for various election interference investigations. Meanwhile, there are currently 291 election deniers who are running for office. 

“The dark shadow of tyranny unfortunately has not gone away,” Judge Jackson said at the hearing. “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.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate