As he saw the mob drag a fellow D.C. police officer down the steps of the U.S. Capitol, Brayden Dyer started to pull out his service weapon.
From behind, another officer put his hand over Dyer’s and told him to put the gun away. Police officers have said they refrained from using firearms during the Jan. 6 riot because they understood many in the crowd to be armed and did not want to get into a shootout. But Dyer testified in federal court last week in the trial of a man accused of taking part in the attack on his colleague, saying he thought deadly force would have been justified after Officer Andrew Wayte was punched, kicked and stomped by the mob.
“I took it upon myself to preserve his life,” Dyer testified.
On Wednesday, Ronald McAbee, 29, was found guilty of taking part in that assault on the West Terrace of the Capitol, the site of intense violence where in minutes multiple police officers were swarmed and beaten while trying to block a tunnel into the building. McAbee, a sheriff’s deputy at a rural Tennessee jail at the time, was on medical leave on Jan. 6 because he had fractured his shoulder in a car accident six days before.
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McAbee pleaded guilty last month to assaulting another police officer, Carter Moore, in the tunnel. But he insisted at trial for the assault of Wayte that he was trying to protect the officer and alert police to the body of an unconscious protester. McAbee was found guilty on five charges, including assaulting, impeding or resisting an officer and civil disorder, as well as three related to having a deadly or dangerous weapon: his reinforced gloves.
Body-camera video shows that after Wayte got knocked down, McAbee grabbed the fallen officer’s legs and pulled Wayte toward him. Moore tried to intervene, hitting McAbee with his baton, and McAbee hit back repeatedly. McAbee grabbed Wayte again when another rioter pulled on the officer’s leg. After they went backward down some stairs together, McAbee and Wayte tussled, pushing each other back and forth. For about 20 seconds, McAbee, whose body weighed about 300 pounds, was on top of Wayte while rioters barraged the officer on all sides.
But McAbee can also be heard on video yelling “No!” and “Quit!” as other rioters tried to reach Wayte. He then said, “I’m trying to help you, man,” and Wayte replied, “I know, help me up.”
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Testifying in his own defense, McAbee said he was trying to help Wayte the whole time, first by “repositioning” his legs and then by bracing himself over the fallen officer to protect him from the mob. He said he attacked Moore because he was “frustrated” and needed space: “In my mind, I’m trying to help.” He was also upset, he said, that no one was helping a woman passed out at the top of the steps. McAbee said he got pulled into the crowd with Wayte involuntarily and only pulled Wayte’s hands off his vest because the officer’s grip was choking him.
Multiple officers testified that McAbee prevented them from rescuing Wayte, and Wayte himself testified that he was only able to climb back behind the police line when someone shoved McAbee off him. Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexandra Foster suggested in closing arguments that McAbee “had a change of heart” once surrounded by attackers yelling “traitor” and “get him.”
Wayte testified in court for the first time about his experience in the maelstrom of violence.
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“I’m flat on my back,” Wayte said. “I am in a great deal of pain, I am incapacitated.” After a long pause, he added, “I am wondering if I was going to die.”
Wayte’s gas mask was torn off, and he was hit in the face with bear spray. “It felt like I was underwater; it felt like I was suffocating,” he said. “I don’t know really how well a camera can even convey … just getting hit so much.” His baton, helmet and cellphone were stolen as he was beaten.
Before his vision clouded, Wayte said he was able to see the patches on McAbee’s protective vest: on one side, “Sheriff,” and on the other, the emblem of the Three Percenters, a right-wing anti-government movement. A slim man with a thick mustache, Wayte said that McAbee’s weight on him felt like “a planet.”
Defense attorney Benjamin Schiffelbein argued to jurors that Wayte and the other officers, contending with flying objects and constant assaults, were too disoriented to accurately remember what happened.
After getting free, Wayte staggered into the Capitol, still unable to see from the chemical spray in his eyes. On his body-camera recording, another officer who saw Wayte immediately shouted for medical help. When another officer poured water over Wayte’s head to clean out his eyes, blood streamed down his face. Wayte then asked, as Officer Michael Fanone did after being assaulted by the same crowd about an hour earlier, whether they had kept the door to the Capitol closed.
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“I wanted to know that everything I had been through hadn’t been in vain,” he testified.
Wayte was taken out in an ambulance and treated for a concussion and a head wound that had to be stapled shut. Days later, he said, when he brushed his hand through his hair he could feel “goose eggs” all over his skull. He was unable to return to work for months.
Meanwhile, McAbee had turned back to the unconscious woman in the tunnel. He tried to perform CPR on her but was yanked off by another protester. Officers then pulled her behind the police line. Rosanne Boyland, 34, died of what was determined to be amphetamine intoxication.
McAbee cried on the stand recalling that moment.
“I felt like I failed,” he said. “I couldn’t save her.”
Conservatives, including some Republican members of Congress, have suggested that police bear responsibility for Boyland’s death.
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“We’re trained not to render aid until a scene was safe,” Moore testified. “That scene was nowhere near safe enough for us to render aid to civilians.” After his scuffle with McAbee, Moore said he “was continually being assaulted until I was rendered not conscious.” Seconds before Wayte’s fall, another officer had been pulled into the mob by his helmet and beaten with a flagpole and a crutch.
McAbee had also been hit in the head, and his shoulder was hurting. Hunched over in pain, he asked the police officers if they would let him into the tunnel to recover. “I can’t go back that way,” body-camera video shows him telling one officer. “Have you seen these — ?” McAbee doesn’t finish the sentence, but on the stand he said he was afraid of the other rioters, who he thought now considered him a “traitor” for helping the police.
Still, McAbee struggled to explain why he was at the front of the police line at all, except that he was “curious about what was going on.” Nor could he explain why he picked up and briefly wielded a police baton, except that it was “nicer” than the one he had back home. He admitted that he was hit in the leg with a rubber bullet before arriving at the tunnel entrance, and saw police fighting to keep rioters back, but kept moving forward.
He suggested the police were partially to blame.
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“There could have been better de-escalation techniques,” McAbee testified. Asked how he would have handled the rioters, he said, “I would have told them to leave.”
McAbee said he was part of no formal Three Percenter group and thought the logo was a “patriotic” nod to the popular myth that only three percent of colonists fought in the American Revolution. But before the riot, McAbee had expressed interest in a local chapter of the Proud Boys, a group known for street clashes, and suggested he was ready to engage in violence on Jan. 6.
“I will rise or fall alongside you,” he told a friend, while planning the D.C. trip. “This is for future generations.” Along with the protective vest, he wore gloves with reinforced knuckles and discussed bringing a tire puncture.
And while on the stand he described himself as feeling “embarrassment” and “shame” over the riot, on Jan. 7 McAbee smiled for a picture with a newspaper headlined, “Insurrection.” A day later, in a message shown in court, he texted another friend, “I’ve shed blood for my country. By the hands of the swamp. I will shed more in the days to come.”
Schiffelbein said that was “masculine puffery,” and that McAbee’s real feelings could be seen in video of him walking away from the tunnel — “hunched over” and “defeated.”
correction
An earlier version of this article incorrectly said Rosanne Boyland died of a methamphetamine overdose. She died of amphetamine intoxication. The article has been corrected.
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