Army veteran William Chrestman was sentenced to 55 months in prison, 36 months of supervised release, and ordered to pay $2,000 in restitution according to the Department of Justice this week.
Chrestman was a member of the Kansas chapter of the Proud Boys and made plans with them to travel to Washington D.C. to support then-President Donald Trump. They stayed in a hotel room he referred to as a "safe house."
Chrestman and the Proud Boys marched to the Capitol and breached through the barricades surrounding it around 2 p.m. on January 6, 2021. Chrestman shouted, "Go! Go! Go!" to encourage others to riot. He then got into a verbal altercation with a law enforcement officer who was firing pepper ball rounds telling him, "Hey, if you shoot, I'll f— take your a— out."
Chrestman entered the Capitol building at about 2:25 p.m., and later described the scene in his own words according to a US Attorney's Office press release: "We had the cops running through the f— State Building [sic], dude, trying to slam the emergency doors, like, the big garage door-type ones that segregate off the rooms, and we were throwing f— chairs under there to block it dude, to keep going down… The cops were legitimately scared for their f— lives."
Throughout the riot, Chrestman wore a tactical vest, carried a gas mask, and brandished an axe handle.
As of early January 2024, the U.S. government has arrested 1,265 defendants in connection with January 6th and 749 defendants have been sentenced.