WASHINGTON — The FBI on Thursday arrested two brothers from Pennsylvania and New Jersey accused of assaulting a New York Times photographer and stealing her camera after they stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Philip Walker, 52, of Upper Chichester, Pennsylvania, and David Walker, 49, of Delran, New Jersey, are charged with forcibly taking an item from a person and assault with the intent to commit another felony, as well as other standard Jan. 6 misdemeanor counts for entering the Capitol. Philip Walker, accused of discarding the camera in a body of water, faces a separate charge of willfully and maliciously destroying personal property.
The photographer in question, who is not named in court documents, is Erin Schaff, who has written about her assault on Jan. 6, in which, she said, rioters inside the Capitol threw her to the floor, broke one of her cameras and stole the other. (Schaff has covered fallout from the riot, including photographing a separate Jan. 6 defendant named Brian Mock for a feature story about Mock's relationship with his son, who turned him in to the FBI and testified at his dad’s trial last year).
Philip Walker, federal authorities said, admitted in an interview with the FBI the week after the Jan. 6 attack that he got into a physical confrontation with a person who he claimed to believe was a member of antifa. Philip Walker said that the person fell to the ground and that he took the person’s camera. “He admitted to leaving the Capitol with the camera, and disposing of it in a body of water while en route to his residence in Pennsylvania,” an FBI affidavit said.
But an account by Schaff, an award-winning photographer, counters the notion that Philip Walker thought she was a member of "antifa" during the assault (although assaulting people and stealing their cameras is a crime regardless of affiliation). Schaff wrote in a piece published in the immediate hours after the attack that her assailants became more enraged when they realized that she worked for the Times.
“Grabbing my press pass, they saw that my ID said The New York Times and became really angry. They threw me to the floor, trying to take my cameras. I started screaming for help as loudly as I could. No one came. People just watched," she wrote, referring to other rioters in the Capitol. "At this point, I thought I could be killed and no one would stop them. They ripped one of my cameras away from me, broke a lens on the other and ran away."
Schaff wrote that she eventually made her way to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s suite, which other rioters were vandalizing, before she found a location to hide her remaining camera, the one that was broken but not stolen.
Because she did not have her press credentials, which had also been stolen, police who were trying to clear the building did not believe her claims that she was a journalist when they encountered her, Schaff said.
"They drew their guns, pointed them and yelled at me to get down on my hands and knees," Schaff wrote. "As I lay on the ground, two other photojournalists came into the hall and started shouting 'She’s a journalist!'"
Reached Thursday, Schaff referred NBC News to a Times spokesperson, who said the paper is grateful to authorities "for their persistence in pursuing justice in this case."
"Independent, fact-based journalism is a cornerstone of democracy and attacks against reporters should be a grave concern to anyone who cares about an informed citizenry," Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha said in a statement.
Online "sedition hunters" — the citizen sleuths who have aided the FBI in hundreds of arrests of Jan. 6 rioters — had been frustrated by the slow pace of the investigation after they helped the FBI build the case against the men. NBC News reported this year that federal authorities put out a public call for information about one of the suspects in January, even though the sleuths said the FBI already had both brothers' names.
About 1,500 people have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, and federal prosecutors have secured more than 1,000 convictions. Hundreds of defendants have received probationary sentences, and more than 600 have been sentenced to periods of incarceration ranging from a few days behind bars to 22 years in federal prison, the sentence imposed on the Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy.
In court cases, federal prosecutors have laid out extensive video evidence of Donald Trump supporters’ brandishing or using firearms, stun guns, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bike racks, batons, a metal whip, office furniture, pepper spray, bear spray, a tomahawk ax, a hatchet, a hockey stick, knuckle gloves, a baseball bat, a massive “Trump” billboard, “Trump” flags, a pitchfork, pieces of lumber, crutches and even an explosive device during the brutal attack, which injured at least 140 police officers.
Trump faces federal criminal charges for his actions on and leading up to Jan. 6, with a federal grand jury indictment alleging he engaged in a campaign to spread "unsupported, objectively unreasonable, and ever-changing" misinformation about the 2020 election to stay in office. He has pleaded not guilty.
While many Jan. 6 defendants still hold on to false beliefs about the 2020 election, several have told judges that they now feel like gullible “idiots” for having fallen for the lies Trump was spreading. At the presidential debate this week, Trump once again refused to acknowledge the fact that he lost the 2020 election and dodged questions about his actions during the Capitol siege.
Trump has referred to Jan. 6 defendants as "hostages," "warriors" and “unbelievable patriots," claiming during the debate Tuesday that Capitol riot defendants had been “treated so badly." He has repeatedly promised to pardon "a large portion" of Jan. 6 defendants and said he would "absolutely" consider pardoning every single Jan. 6 rioter — a group that would include hundreds of criminals convicted of assaulting police officers — if he is elected on Nov. 5.
