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'I didn't punch any officers,' North Carolina man says after new Jan. 6 assault charges

Joe Marusak, The Charlotte Observer on

Published in News & Features

Former Marine Lee Stutts of Lake Norman, N.C., on Saturday defended himself against new federal charges against him related to the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“I didn’t do what they say I did,” the 46-year-old Terrell resident told The Charlotte Observer, days after a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., indicted him on two more charges. “I didn’t punch any officers. I didn’t push any officers.”

A superseding indictment filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia adds two counts of assault and resisting or impeding officers using a dangerous weapon, for a total of 15 counts against Stutts, according to an Observer review of court records.

A superseding indictment typically adds charges to an original indictment after investigators obtain additional information.

A federal grand jury originally indicted Stutts on Jan. 10, the Observer previously reported.

On Jan. 6, 2021, after a speech by then-President Donald Trump, Stutts joined several thousand people who ascended on the Capitol building in Washington. There, a crowd broke through police barricades, breached the building and attempted to stop the joint session of Congress where electoral votes were being counted in the 2020 presidential election.

 

Members of the U.S. House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack found that Trump provoked his supporters to violence through his false allegations of fraud in the election.

Four people died at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, WTOP reported — a woman shot by a police officer, two men of natural causes and a woman who died from an accidental amphetamine overdose. Brian Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer assaulted at the scene, died a day later of a stroke that was ruled natural, according to officials.

“Whup somebody’s ass from antifa’’

Stutts is accused of pushing and shoving officers with his hands, a barricade, a battering ram and a bike rack as he helped lead the Capitol breach, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

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