The former owner of a Bucks County CrossFit gym who recorded herself during the storming of the Capitol saying she was looking for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “to shoot her in the friggin’ brain” was sentenced to 60 days incarceration on Thursday.
But Dawn Bancroft, 60, of Doylestown hasn’t let her conviction for participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection dull her interest in politics.
The onetime owner of Bucks County Elite Fitness ran for and won a spot as a committeeperson in the county’s Republican Party in May’s primary election.
Reached Thursday to discuss Bancroft’s role in the Capitol attack, her prison sentence and how that might affect her position with the local party, county GOP Chair Patricia K. Poprick said she and Bancroft have never met.
“I think we’ll have to have a conversation with her about all that,” Poprick said.
U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, meanwhile, was more resolute as he announced Bancroft’s sentence on the single misdemeanor count of illegally demonstrating on Capitol grounds to which she pleaded guilty last year.
He called her threats to Pelosi “unacceptable” and couched the punishment he imposed as a signal to “misguided souls” who might be inspired to act on what Bancroft described as an idle threat.
“There has to be a message to the others out there that these type of comments have no place in a democratic, civilized society,” he said.
For her part, Bancroft called her remarks “inappropriate, childish and foolish.” And her attorney, Carina Laguzzi, insisted her client had neither the intention nor the means to attack the House speaker.
“It is indeed difficult to put a bullet in anyone’s brain when you are armed with nothing more than ChapStick, a photo ID and a phone in your fanny pack,” the lawyer wrote in court papers in advance of the Thursday hearing. “Dawn Bancroft has never bought a gun in her whole life.”
The sentence Sullivan imposed — which also included orders for three years’ probation, 100 hours of community service, and restitution of $500 — made Bancroft the 22nd Pennsylvania defendant to face punishment for a role in the insurrection, which caused millions of dollars in damage, injured scores of officers and threatened the peaceful transition of power.
In all, more than 840 Americans face charges for participating in or planning the riot — and nearly 70 of them hail from Pennsylvania.
Bancroft’s is one of the longest prison terms imposed so far against defendants from the Keystone State, though cases involving some of the more serious allegations — including attacking police or playing a central role in the planning of the attack — remain pending.
Also Thursday, Sullivan sentenced Maria Santos-Smith — an Upper Black Eddy housekeeper and former hospice care nurse who traveled with Bancroft to Washington D.C. that day and who appeared in her video — to 20 days.
“What I did was the utmost betrayal, so I do want to be punished for my crime,” she told the judge. She added: “I didn’t want to leave Dawn alone. That was the only thought in my mind. … Also, I didn’t want her to do anything crazy.”
Lawyers for both women argued that neither had intended to be caught up in a riot when they traveled from Doylestown to Washington that day. Yet they still found themselves among the mob of supporters of former President Donald Trump that stormed the building.
Surveillance video showed Bancroft and Santos-Smith, 32, entering twice through already shattered windows. Bancroft — wearing a red MAGA beanie and with a flag emblazoned with the words “All Aboard the Trump Train” over her shoulders — appeared to shoot a video on her cellphone of the chaos unfolding inside before climbing back out less than a minute later.
But it was the video she shot as she and Santos-Smith left the Capitol grounds that became the focus for much of the argument at her sentencing hearing.
“We broke into the Capitol. We got inside. We did our part,” she said in the cellphone footage. “We were looking for Nancy to shoot her in the friggin’ brain. We didn’t find her.”
The women stopped to thank Capitol police officers for their service on their way out.
Unlike many of the rioters who have since been charged, Bancroft did not post the video to social media, sending it only to one of her friends. That person forwarded it to the Upper Dublin Police Department, which alerted the FBI.
On Thursday, Laguzzi dismissed her client’s comments as empty “bravado.” She maintained that, like the other rioters, Bancroft had marched to the Capitol on Trump’s direction only for him “to turn his back on them.”
Now, Laguzzi said, news of her arrest and participation in the riot is all that shows up when you Google Bancroft’s name. As a result, Bancroft has been threatened, harassed, lost her gym’s CrossFit affiliation and was ultimately forced to sell her business after more than half of her clients left.
“Who hasn’t told their spouse, ‘I am going to kill you if you leave your shoes on the carpet again!’” Laguzzi wrote in court filings, adding: “If it were not for the political undercurrent of this case … this court would not even consider incarceration as an option.”
But Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean P. Murphy balked at that plea for sympathy and argued that, despite Bancroft’s claims of remorse, Laguzzi’s arguments to keep her out of prison amounted to little more than excuses and “whataboutism.”
“There’s blame laid on President Trump. She lays blame on CrossFit. There’s blame placed on Google,” he said. “Being a top result in Google is something that’s going to happen when you’re a participant in one of the most culturally significant crimes of our lifetime.”
Ultimately, the judge fell somewhere in the middle. He said he’d considered imposing an even longer sentence for Bancroft than the government was requesting and in Santos-Smith’s case, exceeded the term prosecutors were pushing by six days.
But he lauded both women as “decent people” who got caught up in the moment and assured them he’d recommend they serve their sentences in a halfway house instead of a federal detention facility.
“Wrong place, wrong time, wrong company,” Sullivan said. “It is what it is. … The big concern the court has is deterrence to others.”
