Lucas Denney of Mansfield was sentenced to more than four years in federal prison for violently assaulting outnumbered police officers defending the U.S....
lived a quiet life in Mansfield where he raised two children and lived off disability payments after his Iraq War combat service.
Denney’s Iraq War injury left him with PTSD, memory problems and other psychological disabilities, including angry outbursts. But prior to his arrest last year, Denney had never been convicted of a crime, his lawyer said. And like many charged in the violent siege on the Capitol, he was previously largely ambivalent about politics. But when Trump raised hell with false allegations about a stolen election after he was defeated by Joe Biden in 2020, Denney appeared to find a new purpose in life.
Prosecutors said Denney deployed pepper spray at the besieged officers, assaulted them with a pole and tried to disarm them. With a baton or stick in hand, Denney then joined a group of rioters pushing their way through a line of police officers. Shortly afterward, he swung a fist at an officer who’d been dragged down the Capitol steps into the crowd and beaten.
“Military service and service to the community through law enforcement are matters that run in Mr. Denney’s family,” Shipley wrote in a sentencing brief. “I watched during the summer of 2020 as violence and lawlessness descended on cities across the country, including cities in Texas,” Denney wrote in an affidavit. “I watched as violence broke out at political events during months leading up to the 2020 Presidential election.”
Denney says in court filings that he doesn’t know for certain that the people he communicated with shortly before Jan. 6 were actually Proud Boys members. But the prosecutor said that Denney told his supporters in Facebook messages that his Patriot Boys were “allied” with the Proud Boys. On Facebook in December 2020, Denney spoke of plans to meet numerous others in an “intel chatroom” to organize, coordinate and link up with other militias. A few days before the insurrection, he told one person: “I’m so pumped brother. I can’t wait to be in the middle of it on the front line on the 6th,” according to prosecutors.Denney said online that he was looking for people “like us that can go and will actually fight.” He said his militia was meeting with “thousands of other fighters.