A teenage son took the stand in the Jan. 6 trial against his father, who faces five felony charges related to the Capitol riot. Guy Reffitt's son tipped off the FBI about his dad’s extreme rhetoric two weeks before the Capitol attack.
Prosecutors at the first criminal trial over the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, showcased their most compelling evidence on Thursday: testimony from defendant Guy Reffitt’s teenage son about his father’s radicalization in the months leading up to the historic attack.
“What’s about to happen will shock the world,” Guy Reffitt texted his son that day. “We are about to rise up the way the Constitution was written.”“Receiving these messages and reading them, my paranoia pretty much blew over, so, I decided to alleviate some anxieties off my shoulders and to Google FBI and … go forward with any information I had,” he recalled.
He said he didn’t hear back from the FBI until Jan. 6, two weeks after he used his phone to go on the agency’s website and serve up the tip about his father. But by then it was too late. The younger Reffitt said he and his father were close until 2016 or so, with their relationship becoming more strained as their differing political views became more polarized and his dad became more and more involved in the far-right militia group.
“I didn’t make it in, but I started the fire,” Guy Reffitt said in one recording. “I was willing to die when I was there. I was willing to die. … I had a very epic point in my life, actually.” During about three hours on the witness stand Thursday, Jackson Reffitt also told jurors of how, during a heated conversation five days after the riot, his father said he’d kill him and his sister Peyton if they reported him to the FBI.
“‘You better not be recording this or I’m going to put a bullet in your phone,’” Jackson recalled his dad saying, adding, “His eyes grew a little larger. He was shaking a little.”
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