THE FALLOUT
In the predawn hours of Dec. 14, residents of a quiet street in Tamarac, Fla., were woken up by the flashing lights of police vans.
As officers deployed around a modest house, one man videoed a SWAT team arresting his neighbor, Mason Courson, bringing him out of his home with his hands behind his back.
It’s a scene that has played out in hundreds of neighborhoods across the country over the past year. Courson, 26, was allegedly part of the mob of supporters of former President Donald Trump that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, intent on stopping the certification of his loss in the 2020 election. Shouting “Heave, ho!” Courson and a group of rioters had crushed a bleeding D.C. police officer between two doors as they forced their way into the Capitol, according to prosecutors. They said the group went on to beat another officer with a baton, which Courson allegedly kept as a possible “trophy” or “memento.”
It took 342 days for FBI agents to come to Courson’s door and charge him with eight federal offenses, including assaulting officers, civil disorder, and entering a restricted building with a deadly or dangerous weapon. “Crazy they still finding them,” one resident observed in the Facebook comments of a local news story. “Dudes probably thought they got away with it.”
The tear gas had barely dissipated from the Capitol riot last year when the FBI launched the largest federal investigation in U.S. history. Aided by a steady flow of tips from Internet sleuths and the public, the agency has identified and charged more than 720 men and women involved in the attack that left five people dead and lawmakers frantically calling for help as a violent crowd shattered windows and ransacked offices. More than 140 police officers suffered injuries—including concussions, cracked ribs, smashed spinal disks and stab wounds—and four officers who responded have since taken their own lives.
But as investigators closed in, the country drew apart. Today roughly half the number of
