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

A Donald Trump supporter who fired off 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, who is 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 aggravated kidnapping and aggravated sexual assault, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office said.

Banuelos was previously identified in an NBC News story in February 2022, which revealed him as the man who shot off a weapon at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Online “sedition hunters” correctly identified Banuelos, 40, and gave his name to the FBI in February 2021. 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 he was arrested for the stabbing, Banuelos told cops, “I was in the D.C. riots. You can look me up, OK?”

He also told them, “I’m the one in the video with the gun right here.”

Senn’s foster mother told NBC News in 2022 that she was “heartbroken” that the FBI didn’t act on the tip about Banuelos’ conduct at the Capitol after her son was killed. “We’re disappointed in the justice system. ... He should have been arrested. … He’s going to do this to somebody else,” she said.

In a viral Vice News video with footage of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, a man identified as Banuelos is seen with a gun strapped to his waistband in the middle of the crowd. In additional videos released later, Banuelos appears to fire a gun into the air twice.

Though he was identified by citizen investigators months before the stabbing, Banuelos wasn’t arrested by FBI for years. In the immediate wake of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, federal investigators received over 200,000 tips about individuals who may have attended the protest, leading to concerns from some tipsters in the years after the riot that their tips were buried by the sheer volume of calls.

Banuelos was eventually arrested in March 2024 and was ordered to be detained pretrial after prosecutors called his conduct “mind-numbingly dangerous.”

Just after taking office in January, the president issued pardons for nearly 1,500 individuals who were charged in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

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

“President Trump’s going to be in office six months from now, so I’m not worried about it,” Banuelos said, according to a court transcript.

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

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

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

Prosecutors in this case did not immediately respond to an NBC News request for comment.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com