By LINDSAY WHITEHURST
WASHINGTON — A former member of the far-right Proud Boys extremist group who smashed a window at the U.S. Capitol in the building’s first breach of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot was sentenced on Friday to 10 years in prison — and then defiantly declared as he walked out of the courtroom, “Trump won!”
The sentence for Dominic Pezzola, among the longest for Jan. 6 offenses, is the latest handed down after leaders of the group were convicted of spearheading an attack aimed at preventing the peaceful transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden after the 2020 presidential election. The highest profile defendant in the monthslong trial, former top Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, is scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday.
Pezzola, 46, took a police officer’s riot shield and used it to smash the window, allowing rioters to make the first breach into the Capitol, and he later filmed a “celebratory video” with a cigar inside the building, prosecutors said. He was a recent Proud Boys recruit, however, and a jury acquitted him of the most high-profile charge, seditious conspiracy, a rarely brought Civil War-era offense. He was convicted of other serious charges, and prosecutors had asked for 20 years in prison.
“He was an enthusiastic foot soldier,” prosecutor Erik Kenerson said.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly noted that Pezzola, of Rochester, New York, was a newcomer to the group who didn’t write the kind of increasingly violent online messages that his co-defendants did leading up to the Jan. 6 attack. Still, he was in some ways a “tip of the spear” in allowing rioters to get into the Capitol, said the judge, who decided to apply a terrorism enhancement to the sentence.
“The reality is you smashed that window in and let people begin to stream into the Capitol building and threaten the lives of our lawmakers,” the judge told Pezzola. “It’s not something that I ever dreamed I would have seen in our…
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