By Richard Sullins | richard@rantnc.com
A Sanford man convicted last summer of breaching police lines during the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and assaulting officers who were trying to maintain defensive positions while votes from the Electoral College were counted and certified will be sentenced in April, according to court documents posted last week.
David Joseph Gietzen, 30, of Sanford was convicted on August 31 on five felony and three misdemeanor charges relating to his participation in the riot that took place during a two-hour period on the west front of the Capitol as supporters of former President Donald Trump breached the complex’s security perimeter in an attempt to stop the counting and certification of votes taking place in the House and Senate chambers.
Gietzen’s sentence will be pronounced on April 12 in the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse in Washington by Judge Carl J. Nichols in the same courtroom where his trial was held five months ago.
Following Gietzen’s conviction in August, U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves filed a motion to have him confined until sentencing took place. Graves argued, and Judge Nichols agreed, that federal law required his detention because of the violent nature of his crimes. Gietzen was ordered on October 19 to self-surrender the following day in Washington, but he failed to comply.
For 53 days, he was a fugitive and apparently remained in the Lee County area for most, if not all, of that time. A bench warrant for his arrest was issued on November 15 and court records show that he was taken into custody by a Deputy U.S. Marshal on December 12 in Sanford.
An “identity hearing” for Gietzen took place days later in Durham before federal Magistrate Judge Joe Webster. A proceeding of this type is sometimes used by persons who claim that they have been mistaken for someone else, and Gietzen maintained that the government was holding the wrong person in a case of mistaken identity. However, the FBI agent who led the team that built the case against Gietzen over a period of 16 months testified to several means of identification the Marshals Service used to make certain the man they captured was the same person whom he testified against last summer in Washington.
Coming up next for Gietzen is a status hearing on February 2. His court-appointed attorney and the U.S. Attorney will brief the judge on any motions they may be planning to file before the sentencing date.
The federal government must make its recommendations for Gietzen’s sentence by April 8, four days before Gietzen’s sentencing. Given the sentences imposed on others who faced charges similar to Gietzen, he could be facing four or more years in prison, in addition to any additional amounts for failing to turn himself in last October.
Identified through a hotline
In the days following the insurrection, the FBI posted photographs on its website of hundreds of people it wanted to talk in connection to what they either saw or participated in on the afternoon of January 6, as well as a toll-free number where tips could be received. A few days after the melee, the FBI got a call from a tipster who recognized Gietzen in pictures posted on the Bureau’s online website that sought the public’s help in identifying the hundreds who participated in the storming of the Capitol.
That original tip was followed by two others over the succeeding days and the FBI called Gietzen on his cell phone on January 19, the day before Joe Biden’s inauguration, after receiving texts that suggested he and others were returning to the Capitol on Inauguration Day to again attempt to stop the transfer of power.
Gietzen told an agent during the call that he had traveled from Sanford to Washington on January 6 to be part of President Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally but told the FBI he went no further than the police barricades that had been set up at the bottom of Capital Hill. But a photograph posted on social media that day and printed in newspapers across the country on January 7 shows Gietzen standing about 250 yards below a group who had already engaged with Metropolitan Police Officers posted there. And it’s that picture that helped establish the role that he played during the assault.
The photo shows Gietzen wearing a green and dark blue jacket with an easily identifiable pattern. His shoulder-length brown hair and short brown beard and mustache can be seen beneath a white football-type helmet. He was also observed to be wearing knee pads and goggles.
Those features allowed FBI agents to not only spot him among the thousands that marched on the grounds of the Capitol, but also to document what he did as thousands attempted to force their way inside the building to stop the counting and certification of electoral college ballots taking place inside.
Contrary to his statement to the FBI, Gietzen can be seen crossing the security perimeter and taking up a spot on the front row of the confrontation line, pushing and shoving police officers. Video and still pictures show him thrusting his fist at the face of an officer, as well using a long plastic pole to strike officers. One of those lunges can be observed on video as he hits a policeman in the space between his helmet and his Kevlar vest on the shoulder.
Disappears, then reappears
Gietzen is visible in the melee on the Capitol’s West Terrace for about 18 minutes, beginning at 2:13 p.m. that afternoon. He reappears about 90 minutes later, again on the front row of a confrontation line where officers are mounting their last stand at the entrance to the building through an access tunnel.
The bloodiest and most furious of the fighting that day took place there, at the exit point of the West Terrace tunnel. All the while, cameras were documenting Gietzen’s participation at the front of the action as the mob tried repeatedly to surge their way past the police line and make their way inside.
After scouring through the visual evidence collected in the case, prosecutors felt ready to move against Gietzen in the spring of 2022 and he was arrested on May 11 in Sanford. His trial began on August 28, and the jury deliberated for two hours before returning guilty verdicts on all eight charges.
What happens now?
With Thursday’s hearing at the federal courthouse in Durham completed and Gietzen having been transferred to back to Washington, federal officials could decide to move quickly in filing additional charges relating to his failure to abide by the October court order to surrender himself and then fold those into the sentences they were already planning to recommend that resulted from his conviction.
What might those additional charges look like? How will Judge Nichols take Gietzen’s decision to run from justice and become a fugitive into account as he weighs sentencing on the original eight charges of which he was convicted? And among the questions Nichols must now consider is whether, and to what extent, his 54 days of freedom were assisted in some way by others.
Gietzen was convicted on each of five felony charges and federal law provides that anyone who harbored or assisted him while he was a fugitive could receive a prison sentence of up to five years.
Truck driver from Sanford is also sentenced
Meanwhile, another Sanford resident has pleaded guilty and been sentenced as a result of his participation in the events of the Capitol on January 6.
Joshua Hall, a 36-year-old truck driver, was taken into custody in May 2023 by the FBI for trespassing on the Capitol grounds during the riot and being one of the first to enter the building that afternoon. Hall climbed over a railing and was one of the first 20 people to enter the Capitol through its Parliamentarian Door seconds after it was breached around 2:40 p.m. that afternoon.
Closed-circuit video from security cameras inside the Capitol show Hall and a group of others proceeded into the building and went as far as its ornate Brumidi Corridor, just outside the meeting chambers for the U.S. Senate, where senators were meeting to count and certify votes from the election.
The crowd, including Hall, hurled insults at a line of police officers just outside the chambers before he slipped past them and continued inside the building for several minutes before finally exiting the building through its North Appointments Door. His entire 14 minutes inside the complex had been monitored and recorded by security cameras.
In the days leading up to the insurrection, Hall had researched a variety of weapons and ways to protect himself during a protest and had actually shown up in surveillance photos made on the grounds of the Capitol wearing a pink painter’s mask. He had researched “where can I buy a taser gun,” “bear mace,” “goggles for pepper spray,” and “gun store” on his computer before the riot took place.
Upon his return to Sanford, he saw his picture appearing on the front page of a Washington Post story about the insurrection and those who might have played a part in it.
On the day after the insurrection, Hall seemed to have grown concerned about his image appearing in newspapers across the country and used his computer to search for things like “facial recognition,” “facial recognition capitol building,” and “metro pd person of interest.”
Four days later, he searched again for “fbi wanted capitol” and began looking at the FBI’s website containing pictures of persons wanted in connection with the investigation. He was interviewed by the FBI on January 16 and again a year and a half later in the summer of 2022.
On August 1 of last year, Hall agreed to plead guilty to one count of remaining in a restricted building or grounds without authority to do so. His sentence includes one year of supervised probation, a fine of $200, restitution for damages to the Capitol of $500, and an assessment of $25. He originally faced up to one year of imprisonment, a fine of up to $100,000, payment of restitution, and a term of supervised release of up to one year.
But because he entered the plea agreement voluntarily with federal prosecutors, they recommended that Hall receive a lesser sentence. U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves said a reduced sentence for Hall was warranted because of history of mental illness and substance abuse, and a decade-long record of progress he had made in dealing with those issues.
Still, the sentence proposed in his case is consistent with that of others who have pled guilty to similar circumstances.
Three years after the events that took place at the Capitol complex on the afternoon of January 6, 2021, more than 1,265 persons have been charged as a result of their actions that day. About 452 of those persons, including Gietzen, were charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement officers. The longest sentence handed down so far was given to former Proud Boys national leader Enrique Tarrio, who was given 22 years in prison for his role in leading his group’s failed effort to stop the transfer of presidential power.
A total of 140 officers were injured while attempting to defend the Capitol, including 80 U.S. Capitol Police officers and another 60 officers from the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington. Eleven persons have been charged with assaulting members of the media or destroying their equipment. Seven persons died from injuries sustained during the rioting, and the U.S. Capitol building and grounds suffered almost $2.9 million dollars in damages.
