A Chicago man who stole a photograph “of extreme sentimental” value to then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol was sentenced Friday to more than four years in prison.
Kevin J. Lyons became the second known person from Illinois to face federal charges as a result of the Capitol riot when he was arrested exactly one week after the event. The feds have since leveled charges against nearly 40 Illinoisans and more than 1,000 people nationwide.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell found Lyons guilty last April of several charges relating to his role in the Capitol breach. Those charges included obstruction of an official proceeding before Congress and aiding and abetting, for which Lyons faced a maximum of 20 years behind bars.
Lyons’ 51-month sentence exceeds the more than three-year prison sentence given last month to James Robert Elliott of Aurora, a former member of the Proud Boys. That makes Lyons’ sentence the stiffest yet to be handed down to an Illinois resident charged in the Capitol breach.
Federal prosecutors say Lyons, an HVAC technician, drove through the night to arrive in Washington, D.C., on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021. He’d posted his driving route from Chicago on Instagram with the comment, “I refuse to tell my children that I sat back and did nothing. I’m heading to DC to STOP THE STEAL!”
The feds say Lyons walked past stingball bang grenades, and made comments like “I love the smell of teargas in the mid-afternoon,” on his way to entering the Capitol at 2:20 p.m. They said he also called U.S. Capitol officers “f---ing Nazi bastards” and gave a fellow rioter a high-five as he crossed the threshold into the Capitol.
Once inside, Lyons yelled out “Nancy, where are you?” and “Nancy!”
“Lyons’ invocation of the speaker’s name could only be intended and understood as a threat of violence,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean McCauley wrote in a recent court memo.
Lyons ultimately made his way into Pelosi’s office suite. There, he rummaged through a coat, where he found a brown leather wallet containing cash, bank cards, a TSA precheck ID and a driver’s license. Lyons slipped the wallet into his own pocket.
In Pelosi’s private office, Lyons also found a framed photograph of Pelosi with the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis. The photo was taken during a 2019 trip to Africa to commemorate the 400th year since Africans had first passed through the Door of No Return in Ghana on their way to enslavement in North America, prosecutors said. It was signed by the photographer and given to Pelosi two months after Lewis’ death in 2020.
A senior member of Pelosi’s staff told prosecutors the photo of Pelosi with the civil rights icon was one of the first items the staff realized was missing after they returned to the office following the riot.
Prosecutors noted that Pelosi’s staff had been huddled in a nearby locked office, barricaded with furniture, while Lyons and other rioters ransacked her office. Pelosi, two heartbeats away from the presidency, “had been evacuated to a secure location,” they said.
Lyons left the Capitol at 2:50 p.m. and took an Uber back to his car. During the Uber ride, prosecutors say Lyons posed for a photo with the picture of Pelosi and Lewis. In a text message, he told someone, “I’m pretty confident I am now a multiple Federal [sic] felon.”
Prosecutors say the photo stolen from Pelosi’s office “has never been recovered despite a search of [Lyons’] home.”
His defense attorney, Lawrence Wolf Levin, described Lyons in a court memo as “a good, hard-working man” and father of two boys “who made an extremely poor choice.”
Levin wrote that “there is no question that [Lyons] was wrong. He knows that. He accepts responsibility for his actions and is ready to face the consequences.”
