Left: Jan. 6 rioter Richard Ackerman identified in photos provided by Justice Department with red square. Right: Justice Department photo exhibit shows a text message sent by Ackerman where he celebrates stealing a police officer’s helmet as a “war trophy.”
In exchange for the dismissal of other charges including assault, a New Hampshire man who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 — and who federal prosecutors say is part of a neo-Nazi group — has pleaded guilty to obstructing police and stealing one officer’s helmet as his self-proclaimed “war trophy.”
The guilty plea was announced by the Justice Department on Thursday and according to the plea agreement, Richard Ackerman, 22, has admitted to traveling to Washington, D.C., from his home state on Jan. 6 and then joining a mass of rioters fighting with police before he picked up a water bottle and hurled it at officers mired inside the Capitol’s Lower West Terrace Tunnel.
“I was there yesterday … & the helmet is my war trophy from the SWAT team,” Ackerman wrote a day after the attack on the Capitol in one text message provided in a statement of facts following his arrest in June 2023.
In another message with a photo of the stolen helmet affixed, he boasted: “Here’s the helmet I stole … I’ll call you in the next day or two.”
Bubbling over, Ackerman couldn’t help but fire off a flurry of near identical messages to various recipients. “I was at DC today … I was right in the doorway to the building … I stole an officer’s helmet,” he wrote. In a text to someone identified as “Aunt Jen,” Ackerman gushed more: “I stormed the capital, & I grabbed a helmet off of the SWAT team,” and “I ripped a chair out of the office & circled it around … it ended up getting thrown at the police.”
When someone identified in his texts as “A. Jen” told him not to get arrested — “you won’t be able to be a Marine,” she wrote — Ackerman told her things “got really f—— crazy” and that he was in the “eye of it.”
But once more, he bragged: “I stole a SWAT Team officers helmet.”
“Not smart Zach,” his contact replied.
The FBI said it was tipped off about Ackerman’s foray at the Capitol two days after Jan. 6. The tip featured a picture of a U.S. Capitol Police helmet and atop the helmet was a sticker for the neo-Nazi group known as New England 131, or, as they are also known, the Nationalist Socialist Club 131 or NSC-131, for short.
The group is also known to the FBI as the “White Defense Force.”
The so-called “White Defense Force” has “small, autonomous regional chapters in the United States and abroad, whose members see themselves as soldiers at war with a hostile, Jewish-controlled system that is deliberately plotting the extinction of the white race,” according to the FBI.
According to prosecutors, a confidential human source for the FBI attended one of the neo-Nazi group’s meetings and reported hearing that a member online who went by the alias “Zach Parker” had claimed to have stolen a police helmet found on the ground and that “Zach Parker” said he had put the New England 131 sticker on it before photographing it. While at the meeting, the source said “Parker” bragged about the helmet being stowed away at his house in Salem, New Hampshire.
By July of that year, Ackerman left the United States on a flight to Germany and returned in August. When he was stopped by customs agents at Boston Logan International Airport on the return however, he was asked questions about his whereabouts on Jan. 6 and confirmed that he found a helmet on the ground but denied taking it back to his house.
Justice Department provided photos of the front and back of the U.S. Capitol Police officer helmet recovered from Richard Ackerman’s bedroom.
Through a consented search of his phone, prosecutors say they turned up a slew of texts about the helmet and more.
“If I get shot down there, just remember that I thought highly of you,” he wrote to someone identified as “I. Luz” on Jan. 6.
A selfie was also found on his cellphone showing him wearing the helmet and flipping off the camera with his middle finger. In June 2022, FBI agents executed a search warrant on his home. Ackerman wasn’t home but his father was and according to the statement of facts, Ackerman’s father called his son while agents were on site and it was then that Ackerman said the helmet was located inside of a fireplace in his basement bedroom.
The agent found the helmet tucked inside the chimney flue.
A review of the federal docket shows that Ackerman has been on pretrial release since his arrest. He will stay out of jail pending sentencing before U.S. District Judge Tim Kelly, a Trump appointee, on July 25.
In exchange for his guilty plea, the three charges that will be dropped are: assaulting, resisting, opposing or impeding a person engaged in their official duties, entering and remaining in a restricted area or grounds and disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted area.
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