A Jan. 6 protester was sentenced Monday to four years and four months in prison for striking a police officer with a flagpole, according to CBS News.
Peter Francis Stager, a truck driver from Arkansas, was recognized in a video hitting a Metropolitan Police Department officer three times with a flagpole “with a United States flag affixed to it,” according to a warrant. Stager, along with others, dragged the officer down the Capitol steps, forced him into “a prone position on the stairs and proceeded to forcibly and repeatedly strike B.M. [the officer] in the head and body with various objects,” the warrant reads.
Stager in February entered a guilty plea to a felony charge of assaulting police with a dangerous weapon, CBS reported.
Stager was recorded in a video shouting, “Everybody in there is a treasonous traitor. Death is the only remedy for what’s in that building,” according to the warrant. (RELATED: Bill Maher On Jan. 6 Rioters: ‘Kind Of Can’t Blame Them … They Are Getting Squeezed’)
BREAKING: A Jan. 6 defendant who beat an officer with a flagpole was sentenced to more than four years in prison. https://t.co/6i0I9KWOGV
— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 24, 2023
Stager allegedly told a confidential source he “did not know the man he was striking on the ground with the flagpole was a cop and that he thought the person he was striking was ANTIFA.” He also said he “had to apologize to [the confidential source] and to his [Stager’s] sons” for what he had done and that he “intended to turn himself in to law enforcement for his actions,” according to the warrant.
Over 1,000 people were charged with federal crimes related to Jan. 6 and nearly 600 of them were sentenced to imprisonment, according to CBS. Roughly half of those sentenced to prison received terms between three days and 18 years.