Former Jan. 6 defendant arrested on kidnapping and aggravated assault charges

A Donald Trump supporter who fired a gun during the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol was arrested last month on kidnapping and sexual assault charges, according to the Cook County Sheriff’s Office in Illinois.

John Banuelos, 40, originally from Utah but whose sister lives in the Chicago area, was arrested “near 29th Street and Cicero Avenue in Cicero” on Oct. 17, according to the Cook County Sheriff’s Office. A warrant for his arrest was issued in Salt Lake County on Oct. 1 on charges of kidnapping and aggravated sexual assault, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office said.

Banuelos was previously identified in an NBC News article in February 2022, which revealed him as the man who fired a gun at the Capitol on January 6.

Online “sedition hunters” correctly identified Banuelos, 40, and gave his name to the FBI in February 2021. A few months later, on July 4, 2021, Banuelos stabbed a man – Christopher Thomas Senn – to death in Salt Lake City, but was not charged after claiming self-defense.

According to Salt Lake City police, after being arrested for the stabbing, Banuelos told cops, “I participated in the D.C. riots. You can look for me, okay?”

He also told them: “I’m the one in the video carrying the gun right here. »

Senn’s adoptive mother told NBC News in 2022 that she was “heartbroken” that the FBI had not followed up on information regarding Banuelos’ conduct at the Capitol following her son’s death. “We are disappointed by the justice system. (…) He should have been arrested. (…) He is going to do this to someone else,” she said.

In a viral Vice News video featuring footage from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a man identified as Banuelos is seen with a gun strapped to his belt amid the crowd. In additional videos released later, Banuelos appears to fire a gun twice into the air.

Although he was identified by citizen investigators months before the attack, Banuelos was not arrested by the FBI for years. Immediately after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, federal investigators received more than 200,000 tips about people who may have attended the protest, leading some tipsters to worry in the years after the riot that their information had been buried by the large volume of calls.

Banuelos was finally arrested in March 2024 and was remanded in custody after prosecutors called his conduct “incredibly dangerous.”

Just after taking office in January, the president pardoned nearly 1,500 people charged in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Banuelos correctly predicted in court in May 2024 that Trump would be elected and pardon the January 6 rioters.

“President Trump will be in office in six months, so I’m not worried,” Banuelos said, according to a court transcript.

The Justice Department decided to dismiss the case on January 21, 2025, the day after Trump took office.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan then wrote that she could “discern—and neither party has identified—any defect in the legal merits or factual basis of the government’s case,” and that the government’s “only reason for pursuing dismissal with prejudice is that the President, in addition to pardoning the defendant, ordered the Attorney General to do so.” Forgiveness, she wrote, “cannot whitewash the blood, excrement and terror the mob left in its wake.”

“In hundreds of cases like this over the past four years, the judges of this district have administered justice without fear or favor. The historical record established by these proceedings must stand, impervious to political winds, as a testament and a warning,” she wrote.

Prosecutors in the case did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NBC News.