With former President Donald Trump under indictment on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election with repeated lies, his followers who stormed the Capitol in support of those lies keep getting arrested and locked up.
A healthy percentage of those are from Pennsylvania, and the FBI on Monday nabbed another.
Lowell Gates 63, of Mechanicsburg, outside of Harrisburg, is charged in a criminal complaint in the District of Columbia with assaulting police with a weapon and obstruction of law officers during a civil disorder, both felonies. He’s also charged with several misdemeanors in relation to the breach.
Gates was in U.S. custody in Harrisburg on an FBI complaint filed Saturday.
Agents said he traveled to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, with a group of friends and attended the Trump rally, then walked with the mob toward the Capitol. Video shows him using a cellphone to photograph or video the riot while standing near scaffolding next to the West Plaza.
At 2:29 p.m., Gates is seen on body-cam videos throwing an object at police and then attacking them with a flagpole, according to an FBI affidavit. Video shows him using the pole like a spear in lunging at officers and hitting them at least three times, the FBI said.
Online sleuths helping the FBI identify rioters nicknamed the flagpole-wielding suspect “BrownJacketJabber” because of his clothing. In addition to his jacket, he wore jeans, black gloves and glasses.
In early 2022, tipsters said BrownJacketJabber was Gates. Agents got a Pennsylvania driver’s license for him and matched the photo with the ones in the videos.
In October 2022, agents went to his workplace in Camp Hill to try to talk to him. He agreed and admitted to being at the Capitol riot. He also gave agents his cell number, and they matched it with cellphone tower records to put him at the Capitol.
Gates said he was near the bottom of the steps and saw cops spraying rioters in the face with pepper spray.
He said he “would have been pissed” to get sprayed, according to the affidavit. After the spraying, he said pushing and shoving began and Gates was hit by a “rubber ball” of some sort. He said he had to pull his jacket over his head to protect himself from the pepper spray.
“He felt he did not deserve to be sprayed” but that he “generally had a lot of fun” at the riot, the affidavit says.
Gates will be arraigned before the same U.S. magistrate judge, Moxila Upadhyaha, who arraigned Trump last week.
More than 1,000 people have been arrested in the Capitol riot.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, which puts out regular updates on the cases, said Monday that the investigation “continues to move forward at an unprecedented speed and scale,” adding that DOJ’s resolve to hold rioters accountable “has not, and will not, wane.”
As of Friday, 1,106 defendants have been charged in either federal or state court. They come from all 50 states. About 630 have pleaded guilty, including 198 of them to felonies, with 86 of those admitting to assaulting police.
Pennsylvania has been well-represented among the rioters, with about two dozen from the Western District of Pennsylvania or nearby regions.
The FBI is still looking for 321 people believed to have been at the Capitol that day. The bureau has 14 videos of suspects wanted for violent assaults on federal officers and another video of two suspects who assaulted the media.
Torsten covers the courts for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Reach him at jtorsteno@gmail.com.
