One year later, North Carolina residents’ role in the US Capitol violence grows

Brad Bennett will mark the first anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by linking into a remote court hearing over his own role in the attack.

The former Mecklenburg County resident, wellness coach and survivalist trainer is charged with six crimes — one of them a felony that could send him to prison — in connection with the violent attempt by thousands of Donald Trump supporters to stop the certification of the former president’s 2020 election defeat.

Five deaths are linked to the violence. Some 140 police officers were injured. The Capitol ransacking, which was ignited by groundless claims of voter fraud, left more than $1.5 million in damage.

Yet, nearly a year after the attack — and nine months after he turned himself in to the FBI in Charlotte — Bennett’s case and hundreds like it remain in legal gridlock.

The FBI continues to make arrests — more than 725 have been charged up to now, including at least 14 North Carolinians. Slightly more than 50 defendants have been sentenced, CNN reported this month.

Federal prosecutors say they are still collecting and disseminating massive amounts of evidence, including social media records and thousands of hours of video taken in and around the Capitol on the day of the assault.

Meanwhile, the state’s footprint in the Jan. 6 violence continues to grow.

In late November, the FBI arrested Aiden Bilyard of Cary. Photos show the 19-year-old shooting chemical “bear spray” at a line of police officers and later using a baseball bat to break out a Capitol window, which he and scores of other rioters used as a portal to the Senate side of the building.

On Dec. 15, a federal grand jury in Washington, also handed down an expanded indictment against Grayson Sherrill, a Cherryville resident now accused of several acts of violence inside the Capitol, including assaulting a police officer with a metal pole.

Bennett and Sherrill, 22, are among seven North Carolina residents currently saddled with felony charges. Legal experts have told the Observer that they expect almost all those convicted of the more serious crimes to serve prison time.

On Dec. 17, a federal judge in Washington sentenced a Florida man to five years, the longest prison term yet handed down against one of the Capitol marauders. Robert Palmer had been caught on camera throwing a fire extinguisher at police.

And at least two North Carolina defendants — Laura Steele and Charles Donohoe — have been named in a sweeping new Dec. 14 criminal complaint filed by the District of Columbia against two paramilitary groups who the government says helped plan the Capitol siege.

“The result of that planning, the Jan. 6th Attack on the Capitol, was not a protest or a rally,” the complaint states. “It was a coordinated act of domestic terrorism.”

A separate criminal cases alleges that Donohoe, a Kernersville resident, is a member of the right-wing Proud Boys and helped plan and direct the group’s activities during the mob attack.

Steele, who was arrested in February along with other accused Oath Keepers, already faces six charges under a new federal indictment handed down on Dec. 1. She pleaded not guilty five days later.

In an odd family twist, federal prosecutors say Steele was recruited to join a Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers by her brother, Graydon Young. He has pleaded guilty to a series of riot-related charges. Steele is scheduled to be tried in January.

Her attorney, Peter Cooper of Washington, did not immediately respond to an Observer email on Dec. 23 seeking comment.

Capitol riot suspects from NC

The state’s other felony defendants include:

▪ Matthew Wood of Reidsville, who originally told the FBI that he entered the Capitol only to avoid being trampled, but was caught on camera urging the mob to attack police, prosecutors allege.

▪ Lewis Cantwell of Sylva, who is charged with six crimes and, according to court records, appears to have backed off from entering a guilty plea.

▪ Chris Spencer of Pilot Mountain, half of North Carolina’s only husband-wife team of defendants. Virginia Spencer has pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge and is to be sentenced Jan. 7. Chris Spencer has pleaded not guilty.

Bring the kids

Normally, a misdemeanor charge in the Capitol cases has not carried a prison sentence. But in a December sentencing memorandum to Virginia Spencer’s judge, prosecutors noted for the first time that the Spencers brought one of their children, a 14-year-old son, to the riot.

The family took part in one of the first waves that stormed the building, briefly entered House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office suite, and joined another mob that massed outside the House chamber when the representatives were still trapped inside, Assistant U.S. Attorney Douglas Collyer wrote.

Virginia Spencer’s “participation in a riot… combined with the defendant involving her minor child renders a sentence of incarceration both necessary and appropriate in this case.”

Collyer recommended three months in custody, three years of probation and $500 in restitution.

Virginia Spencer’s attorney, Allen Orenberg of Potomac, Md., did not immediately respond to an Observer email seeking comment.

Two other Charlotte-area Capitol defendants are weighing plea deals from their prosecutors, according to The State newspaper in Columbia.

Elias Irizarry, 19, of Rock Hill, and Elliott Bishai, 20, of Fort Mill, S.C., were caught on video and photographs inside the Capitol with Sherrill. Both face misdemeanor charges. This month, Irizarry, a sophomore at The Citadel, received the go-ahead from his Washington judge to travel to Germany with his mother. He and Bishai are scheduled to be back in court Feb. 23.

New attorneys

All the criminal dockets for the North Carolina and Charlotte-area defendants reflect the start-stop pace of criminal justice, particularly for such a vast prosecution.

Many of the group’s pretrial hearings routinely have been rescheduled, with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington frequently citing the demands of gathering and distributing the growing mounds of evidence.

Bennett, 42, formerly of Huntersville, has not been accused of any acts of Capitol violence. But federal prosecutors say he used his social media pages to whip up anger leading up to the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally for Trump and entered the Capitol with his then-Texas girlfriend. He later dodged the FBI for three weeks in and around Charlotte before he agreed to turn himself in. He spent three months in jail before being released to his family in Randolph County.

This week, Bennett added a layer of uncertainty to his own case by firing his longtime attorney, Albert Watkins of St. Louis.

In previous court documents, Watkins, who represented several other Jan. 6 defendants, including Jacob Chansley, the so-called “QAnon Shaman,” had alluded to the possibility of Bennett reaching a plea agreement with prosecutors.

But in a surprise Dec. 20 filing, in which the attorney obliquely cited “an unanticipated and unforeseen real or perceived conflict issue,” Watkins announced that Bennett wanted a new lawyer.

How that affects the schedule of the case — including Bennett’s status hearing on Jan. 6, 2022 — remains to be seen. Bennett could not be reached by email or phone; Watkins did not respond to an Observer email seeking comment.

Likewise, fellow N.C. defendant Cantwell may be adapting a new legal strategy. According to his court file, the Sylva man was expected to enter a guilty plea on Dec. 10. Instead, that hearing was canceled, and Cantwell hired California attorney Nic Cocis to take over his case.

Cocis, who already represents a California defendant in the Capitol attack, has been outspoken in the past about the prosecution of the cases.

“This is nothing more than Big Brother trying to make criminals out of law-abiding citizens who were exercising their constitutional liberties,” Cocis said after the June arrest of his California client, part of a group that had driven across the country to be in Washington on Jan. 6.

Cantwell’s hearing has been moved to February. In an email to the Observer, Cocis would not say if a plea deal for his new North Carolina client is still on the table.

“His case was continued so I can get up to speed with the evidence,” Cocis said. “Once I do that, we’ll decide which direction to take the case.”

Meanwhile, Matthew Wood of Reidsville, also is changing lawyers. In September, prominent Winston-Salem trial attorney David Freedman, who had been representing Wood, died from COVID-19.

Wood is scheduled to be back in federal court on Jan. 31. His new attorney, Kira West of Washington, who took over the case in mid-December, declined comment on Dec. 22.

This story was originally published December 28, 2021 at 6:15 AM with the headline "One year later, North Carolina residents’ role in the US Capitol violence grows."

Michael Gordon

The Charlotte Observer

704-358-5095

Michael Gordon has been the Observer’s legal affairs writer since 2013. He has been an editor and reporter at the paper since 1992, occasionally writing about schools, religion, politics and sports. He spent two summers as “Bikin Mike,” filing stories as he pedaled across the Carolinas.