WASHINGTON — A far-right extremist who already served time for his role in the racist "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville in 2017 was sentenced to more than four years in federal prison Friday for stealing a police shield and twice using it against officers during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Tyler Bradley Dykes, who was previously discharged from the Marines for “participating in extremist behavior,” was accused by prosecutors of giving a Sieg heil! (Hail to victory!) salute during the 2021 Capitol attack. But Dykes, a 26-year-old from Bluffton, South Carolina, denied that his celebration on the steps of the U.S. Capitol after the mob broke through a police line had been the Nazi salute.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell didn’t find his claim believable, noting that he’d use the same salute during the Charlottesville rally and noted an extensive pattern of extremist behavior over several years.
Howell sentenced Dykes to 57 months in federal prison and fined him $20,000. During the sentencing hearing, Dykes said that he still stood with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and that he supports Trump "to be the next president of our country."
Prosecutors noted that Dykes quoted Adolph Hitler before the Jan. 6 attack and said during the hearing that Dykes had participated in a training for the neo-Nazi accelerationist group, The Base.
"It was not impulsive conduct that can be explained by an underdeveloped brain," Howell said.
Howell also took offense to the suggestion, from one of Dykes' attorneys, that his use of the salute was inconsequential.
"You don't think using a Sieg heil! salute makes a difference?" she asked, before encouraging the lawyer to move on from the argument that there was some doubt about whether it was actually a Nazi salute. "Facts are facts."
Dykes, who prosecutors said went by “Nocturnal Wolf" in online chats and stored extensive extremist material, was charged in connection with the Capitol attack in July 2023 and pleaded guilty in April to two felony counts of assaulting, resisting or impeding officers who were protecting the Capitol. At the time he was taken into federal custody, he was serving a five-year sentence for his actions in Charlottesville, but 4.5 years of that sentence were suspended and he ended up only doing four months in connection with that case.
Dykes was prosecuted and convicted in Virginia for burning an object with an intent to intimidate, and federal prosecutors noted he "carried a lit torch, performed the Sieg Heil salute, and he marched with others to express his white supremacist views" during that 2017 march. They also said video showed that Dykes engaged in assaultive conduct in Charlottesville. His arrest in the Charlottesville case didn't come about until 2023 and he was wearing the same Adidas baseball hat he wore on Jan. 6 when he was taken into custody, which helped the FBI confirm his identity and led to his arrest on Jan. 6 charges.
During Friday's hearing, Dykes did not distance himself from extremist ideologies, nor did he say he no longer believes the former president's lies about the election. His biggest expression of regret seemed to be for his elderly parents, who adopted him as a child and who are still providing him with a monthly allowance, he said. Dykes had set up a thriving computer business before his arrest and said even now he's bringing in $9,000 a month, the equivalent of a six-figure salary.
Dykes told Howell that he felt an adrenaline rush unlike anything he'd ever felt before on Jan. 6, saying it was more than a roller coaster or bungee jumping. "I falsely believed that I would be free of consequences," he said.
Two officers who faced off with Dykes during the Capitol attack were present in the courtroom for his sentencing. One of the men, a former Capitol Police officer referred to in court as "Lt. R.R.," spoke about the trauma that he and his fellow officers endured at the hands of the pro-Trump mob, who believed the former president's lies about the 2020 election.
Lt. R.R., who told NBC News after the hearing that he only wished to be identified by the initials he used in court, said that he was initially part of the response to the pipe bombs left at the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee buildings, which are located near the Capitol complex. But he felt a duty to respond to the Capitol itself after hearing the commotion and chaos unfolding over the radio.
"I couldn't turn my back on the Capitol," he said. "It was a matter of life and death."
Rioters grabbed him, he said. They punched him. He was hit with pipes, flag poles and pepper spray so often that he lost vision. In training, he said, officers had all the water they needed to decontaminate from the chemical spray. On Jan. 6, they had to use mere ounces, often splitting water bottles between two officers who had been hit with spray.
One of the most disturbing things he heard were calls from rioters telling him to leave, to abandon his post, to let the mob take over the building and get to the lawmakers that police were protecting. That offended him, he said.
"As if I was only there for show and I don't really care about democracy," he said.
Lt. R.R. said he found it "bizarre" that rioters were singing the national anthem during an assault on the democratic process and said that he wondered how members of the mob thought a similar fight should play out after the next election, or in reaction to news from the Supreme Court. Do they just think whoever uses the most violence should win?, he wondered aloud.
"I think that democracy and the rule of law is fragile, and it's not guaranteed," Lt. R.R. said. "That's not the America I believe in."
Elsewhere in the federal courthouse, a member of the far-right group America First, who are often referred to as "Groypers," was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison. Joseph Brody was on the floor of the U.S. Senate, inside former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office, on Jan. 6, 2021, and lifted a metal barricade as an officer struggled to keep the mob from breaching the north doors to the Capitol.
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich said she was concerned about Brody's "reluctance to launch" even after graduating high school with a 4.0 GPA. Brody, who was a paid campaign worker for Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin during the 2022 campaign, said he had worked at Target and Chipotle in the past, but he had not been employed recently because he wasn't sure what his future held. Brody told the court that he lacked the "courage to go against the crowd" on Jan. 6.
