‘I will not step one foot out of line’: 18-year-old charged in Capitol riot begs for release
He’s the youngest of the hundreds accused of joining in on the Capitol riots
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Your support makes all the difference.Bruno Joseph Cua, 18, the youngest of the more than 300 people accused of attacking the Capitol on 6 January to halt the election, pleaded with a judge in Georgia this week to let him go back to his family before his trial.
In an error-riddled message to US District Court Judge Randolph D Moss, Mr Cua, who is accused of assaulting a federal officer before making his way to the Senate floor with a baton, says he isn’t a danger to anyone and was making empty threats on social media. He has pleaded not guilty.
“My posts were foolish, unnessacary (sic), and untrue, thats (sic) not who I am or ever want to be, I have completely comprehended a very painful! Lesson over the last month in jail, including over two weeks in isolation,” he wrote in a letter to the court on Thursday. “I have completely lost those aggressive feelings and moved on from the entire political idea. I was wrong.”
The young man’s attorneys have argued he was a foolish youth swept up into heated political talk online, writing in a 26 February motion that he was“an impressionable 18-year-old kid who was in the middle of finishing his online coursework to graduate from high school when he was arrested.”
In the letter, Mr Cua, who has been in jail in Oklahoma and Georgia since being arrested, sounds extremely homesick.
“I promise I will not step one foot out of line, I miss my family more than anything in the world, I have never been away from them like this,” Mr Cua added in the letter.
The court denied Mr Cua bond in mid-February, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which first reported the letter, and prosecutors have objected to Mr Cua’s release to his family, which drove him to Washington DC ahead of the riots..
“We never would have gone to Washington if we would have know things would have turned violent,” his parents wrote in a letter to the court. “We wish so much that we would not have agreed to let him get a closer look at what was unfolding at the Capitol, but we honestly had no thought that Bruno would ever get involved.”
In social media posts ahead of and during the riots, Mr Cua fantasize about violence toward legislators and celebrated the attack on the Capitol, according to prosecutors.
“we just have to take back what’s ours,” he allegedly wrote in December.
“We didn’t attack American people. We attacked the swamp rats,” he said the day of the attacks, adding that wanted to “lock the swamp rat tyrants in the capitol and burn the place to the ground.”
Mr Cua’s trial is set to begin 10 May.