Federal investigators have accused a New York man of stealing a police officer’s badge and radio during the Capitol riot, and later claimed in an FBI interview that he was actually trying to save the officer. DC police officer Michael Fanone was tasked with being robbed and knocked unconscious while trying to defend a Capitol gate during the Jan. 6 riot. A riot police even tried to grab Fanone’s gun, saying he wanted to kill the cop with it, according to Fanone. In a criminal complaint filed Friday, prosecutors alleged that Thomas Sibick ripped off Fanone’s badge and radio during melee.
Investigators identified Sibick by comparing photos of her during the riot, sent by tipsters, with images from Sibick’s body camera attacking Fanone. However, when officers interviewed Sibick, he stated that he was actually trying to pull the policeman to safety and inadvertently grabbed his badge and radio. He said he threw the items in a nearby trash can, before changing his story to say he took them to his hotel and then home to Buffalo where he dumped them in a trash can. Days later, when police said they would recover the closed-circuit television near the container, Sibick felt “bewildered” and said she “wanted to do the right thing,” the complaint says. He admitted he had buried the badge in the back garden and bought a metal detector to dig it out. He returned it to police in a muddy plastic bag.