Capitol rioter Jeffrey Sabol dragged cop to be beaten with a flagpole ‘in a fit of rage,’ prosecutor says

A geophysicist from Colorado admitted to authorities that he was “in a fit of rage” when he dragged a police officer to be viciously beaten by a man with an American flag pole and others during the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, a prosecutor revealed.

The suspect, Jeffrey Sabol, tried to kill himself sometime after the riot and also bought a plane ticket from Boston to Zurich, Switzerland, the prosecutor said at Sabol’s arraignment hours after his arrest at a Westchester County, New York hospital Friday morning.

“He has the financial wherewithal to flee these charges,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin Gianforti said during a hearing conducted over video conference and phone in U.S. District Court in White Plains, New York.

The prosecutor said authorities have reason to believe that Sabol may “have assaulted another police officer” with a baton that he is seen wielding during the riot.

Sabol “admitted to being in a fit of rage” during the attack on the cop, and told authorities that his memory from much of the rest of the day on Jan. 6 is foggy, Gianforti told Judge Andrew Krause.

Krause ordered Sabol, 51, held without bond on a criminal complaint filed against him in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., calling him a danger to the community and a risk of flight.

“That conduct is beyond the pale,” Krause said in ordering Sabol’s detention on a charge of civil disorder.

“These are extremely serious actions and these actions have consequences,” the judge told Sabol, a divorced father-of-three, who grew up in New York state and whose sister is a colonel in the U.S. Army.

Sabol, authorities said, is seen during the riot on a widely viewed video wearing a brown jacket, a helmet and a backpack, as he dragged a cop on the ground in front of the Capitol where another rioter began hitting the officer with the flag pole.

Gianforti noted what he called the “irony” of the officer being assaulted with the U.S. flag during the riot by a mob of supporters of President Donald Trump, who were opposed to Congress confirming the election win of President Joe Biden.

The prosecutor said police in Clarkstown, New York found Sabol in his car on Jan. 11, but did not detail why Sabol was not arrested that day.

Sabol’s federal defender, who asked that he be released on a $200,000 bond, told Krause that Sabol spent a week in a psychiatric center receiving treatment after the riot.

Sabol’s lawyer also said the defendant is now stable.

The lawyer said Sabol’s work history is “second to none,” and that his most recent job was removing unexploded ordnance from federal land for a Colorado environmental company.

The president of the company where Sabol works declined to comment, saying he had only just learned from a CNBC reporter that Sabol had been arrested in connection with the Capitol riot.

Also Friday, a New York City sanitation worker was arraigned on charges of participating in the riot.

The garbage man, Dominick Madden, was identified in videos posted online showing him at the Capitol Hill insurrection wearing a sweatshirt supporting right-wing conspiracy QAnon. The New York Post first reported his identification on Jan. 14.

Madden was arraigned in the federal court in Brooklyn by Magistrate Judge Ramon Reyes, Jr.

Madden, 43, was charged in the District of Columbia with knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, knowingly engaging in disorderly or disruptive conduct in any restricted building or grounds, and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capital grounds.

According to an affidavit submitted by an FBI agent in support of the complaint, Madden took a sick leave from his employment with the city’s Department of Sanitation during the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. The department has since suspended Madden, the affidavit said.

Madden was released on a $150,000 bond, with his sister and brother-in-law’s Middletown, New Jersey, home listed as collateral.