Jan. 6 Rioter Who Beat Officer With Flagpole Gets Four-Year Sentence
A truck driver who assaulted a police officer with a flagpole at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was sentenced on Monday to 52 months in federal prison.
The attack by the driver, Peter Stager, produced one of the most disturbing images to emerge from the Capitol attack. Mr. Stager, 44, of Conway, Ark., was captured on video beating the officer, Blake Miller, with the flagpole in a fit of rage as Officer Miller lay facedown in a mob of other rioters with “no means of defending himself,” prosecutors wrote in court papers.
Mr. Stager was one of nine men charged with assaulting Officer Miller and two of his colleagues, Officers Carter Moore and Andrew Wayte, in a 90-second spree of violence that unfolded on the steps outside a tunnel at the Lower West Terrace of the Capitol. Officers who fell victim to attacks in a tunnel on the terrace and on the steps there have repeatedly likened the violence to the hand-to-hand combat of a medieval battle.
After assaulting Officer Miller, prosecutors say, Mr. Stager was caught on video pointing at the Capitol, and declaring: “Everybody in there is a disgrace. That entire building is filled with treasonous traitors. Death is the only remedy for what’s in that building.”
Source: The New York Times
