Proud Boy who broke Capitol window: ‘I got caught up in all the craziness’

“I got caught up in all the craziness,” he said. “I broke one pane of glass, one.”

Pezzola said he was testifying not to clear his own name but because “these men over here should not be held responsible for my actions.” He meant his four co-defendants, all leaders in the far-right Proud Boys group that Pezzola had joined in late 2020, and he repeatedly stated that he knew of no plan by the group to storm the Capitol or interrupt the electoral vote certification.

Prosecutors have depicted Pezzola as key to a Proud Boys plot to lead the mob into violent action that would upend the 2020 election results; the window he smashed was the first breach of the Capitol building. Pezzola insisted there was no such plot.

“The craziest damn thing is I never even knew these guys before I met them here in court,” Pezzola testified in the trial that has been ongoing for months. He said he had only met longtime Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio once, at a December 2020 rally in D.C. After that event, Tarrio, a co-defendant, posted a photograph of Pezzola on the right-wing social media site Parler captioned “Lords of War.”

But Pezzola also sought to cast his own actions as a response to police aggression. He has been barred by U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly from arguing that he was acting in self-defense on Jan. 6. Still, Pezzola testified that he took the shield “out of fear for my own life, because deadly force was being used against us by the police.”

He said that the police use of flashbangs, pepper spray and rubber bullets made him “angry,” and that “I was trying to explain to cops that it’s not legal to shoot people in the face” when he fell to the ground. He said someone else got the shield from an officer first, “and I grabbed it from them.”

After that, he said, “I entered the building, I wandered around lost, I had no idea where I was going, took some pictures and kind of followed the crowd.”

During opening statements, prosecutors played a video of Pezzola smoking a cigar in the Capitol and saying, “I knew we could take this … over [if we] just tried hard enough.” They have also highlighted the fact that before breaking into the building, Pezzola met up with Proud Boy Charles Donohoe, who texted a leadership group that they “got a riot shield.” Donohoe has pleaded guilty to involvement in a conspiracy to storm the Capitol.

Prosecutors will have a chance to cross-examine Pezzola later this week. The only other defendant to testify at the trial, Philadelphia Proud Boy Zachary Rehl, underwent what his lawyer described as “harsh” questioning from the government Tuesday during which he was accused for the first time of pepper-spraying police officers at the Capitol.

Rehl denied that, continuing to insist that from his vantage point on Jan. 6 he saw “nothing out of the ordinary for a protest.”

In Pezzola’s second day on direct examination from his lawyer, Steven Metcalf, he said when he awoke on Jan. 6 there was no plan at all for the Proud Boys, until they received a message from Telegram at 9 a.m. to meet at the Washington Monument at 10 a.m. Once the group gathered at the monument, Pezzola said, “We basically stood around there for a while. Nobody had any idea.”

Instead of waiting for President Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally speech, the group marched off toward the Capitol. Pezzola said he and three of his friends “were complaining, ‘What are we doing? The speech is back there.’ We were getting pretty upset we came all this way to hear Trump’s speech and we’re walking away.”

Pezzola’s group wandered around D.C. looking for a bathroom, and reunited with the Proud Boys at a group of food trucks on Constitution Avenue. He said they then realized there was a commotion nearby, which was rioters preparing to overrun the first police barriers at the Peace Circle.

Moving with the crowd toward the Capitol, Pezzola said he saw one rioter, Joshua Black, get hit in the face by a rubber bullet, and helped treat his bloody wound. Black would later be photographed on the floor of the Senate. Pezzola said he saw Capitol Police officers firing “randomly” into the crowd which had amassed along bicycle racks separating them from the police. In videos played by Metcalf, Pezzola pointed out flashbang grenades flying through the air and exploding at the rioters’ feet.

Pezzola is charged with stealing a police officer’s riot shield, but he claimed he didn’t take it. He narrated a video in which he claimed another man, wearing a black jacket with a white “W” on it, had yanked it away from an officer who had fallen in the crowd. Pezzola said he too had fallen and was on his back.

“After the shots started coming in randomly,” Pezzola testified, “and I initially grabbed onto the shield, I did pull on it, I pulled it a little bit into the crowd this way, I think there was a step I fell over, I actually landed completely on my back.” He said he was able to take possession of the shield as he used it to stand back up.

“I was in complete fear for what was going on,” Pezzola said. “At any moment I could be hit by one of these, I could be hit by a rubber bullet. The whole time we were in the area of the scaffolding, there were police shooting down at us, I used the shield to protect my face. Sure I should’ve turned around and gone home, but I didn’t have full control of my actions, I guess I should say.”

He moved with the rioters to the Capitol building, and saw that one man had already smashed a pane of a window with a 2 x 4 board. Pezzola said that gave him the idea to smash the pane next to it, and then he climbed through. “It was stupid. It wasn’t anything I’m proud of,” Pezzola said.

He said he wandered around the Capitol for a few minutes, did not join any of the fights between rioters and police, then walked out of the Capitol and handed the police shield to an officer.