A January 6 rioter who supplied the taser used to attack a police officer during the Capitol attack will spend years behind bars.
Kyle Young, 38, was sentenced to seven years in prison during a tense hearing on Tuesday. Young, who brought his 16-year-old son to Washington DC from Redfield, Iowa, for the insurrection, had pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting or impeding officers in May.
While in the lower west terrace area of the Capitol, Young held a strobe light, pushed forward a stick-like object and assisted in throwing a large audio speaker toward the police line. He then held former Metropolitan Police Department officer Mike Fanone’s left wrist and arm as Mr Fanone, 42, was harmed on his neck with a taser provided by Young.
Mr Fanone suffered a heart attack and traumatic brain injury as a result of the assault and retired from the Capitol police force last year. In an op-ed for CNN titled What my January 6 assailant deserves, Mr Fanone, who yelled ‘I got kids!’ as he tried to appeal to the mob’s emotions, said he was also diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
During his victim’s statement at the sentencing hearing, Mr Fanone recounted the negative effects of January 6 on his life and said he hoped Young suffered in prison, prompting an election denier to call him a “piece of [expletive]” before the heckler was removed from the courtroom.
“Young, who was there in the middle of the mob just outside the tunnel, restrained me as I recoiled from the first Taser shocks,” Mr Fanone said in his piece for CNN.
“On my body-worn police camera footage, Young’s menacing face and arms lunge toward me as I howl in pain. Like the three [t]aser scars on my neck, his face is a memory I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life.”
In the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, Mr Fanone, now a law enforcement analyst for CNN, became a vocal critic of the mob that attempted to disrupt Congress from convening to certify the electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election. He has appeared on television and before the January 6 House Select Committee to decry the insurrection.
Mr Fanone explained that in his 20 years as an MPD officer, he had endured several physical injuries but none had been as haunting and difficult to heal as those inflicted on him by rioters.
“The assault on me by Mr Young cost me my career, it cost me my faith in law enforcement and many of the institutions I dedicated two decades of my life to serving,” Mr Fanone said in court on Tuesday, according to The Washington Post.
Writing about what he thought justice looked like in the piece published before Young’s sentencing on Tuesday, Mr Fanone said that he believed his assailant deserved “no less than 10 years in prison [a]nd an assigned cell in maximum security with his co-conspirator: Donald Trump.”
Young apologised to Mr Fanone in court. He will have to pay $2,000 in restitution and will be placed on three years of supervised release after he serves his sentence.
