A retired firefighter who threw a fire extinguisher at police officers during the Capitol riot was sentenced to more than four years in prison on Tuesday.

Robert Sanford hit two police officers on the head with the fire extinguisher he threw as he stormed the Capitol with a crowd of Donald Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. He also threw an orange traffic cone at a Capitol Police sergeant.

Sanford also hurled obscenities and insults at law enforcement officers on the Lower West Terrace, calling them traitors, prosecutor Janani Iyengar wrote in a lawsuit.

One of the officers hit by the fire extinguisher had a bump and swelling on his head; the other had a headache and went to a hospital for a medical examination, prosecutors said.

U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman sentenced Sanford to four years and four months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, according to an online court record. Federal prosecutors had recommended a prison sentence of five years and 11 months.

Sanford, 57, of Boothwyn, Pennsylvania, worked as a firefighter for 26 years before retiring in 2020.

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Sanford traveled to Washington with friends from Pennsylvania on a bus tour organized by the conservative activist group Turning Point USA. He listened to speeches at Trump’s January 6 rally outside the White House before joining the crowd marching toward the Capitol and disrupting the joint session of Congress held to confirm Democrat Joe Biden’s election victory over Trump .

Sanford was arrested on January 14, 2021. He has been in prison since pleading guilty last September to assaulting, resisting or obstructing police officers with a dangerous weapon, an offense that carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. He was not charged with entering the Capitol on January 6.

Sanford began working with a cult deprogramming specialist in August 2022 and, according to attorney Andrew Stewart, faced facts about the baseless conspiracy theory that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election from Trump.

“Even after he was in prison, he engaged in regular discussions designed to challenge his ideology and belief structure and then help him understand how and why he developed the beliefs that led him to make the decisions he January 6,” Stewart wrote in a court filing.

Sanford believed police had attacked him and others without provocation when he picked up and threw what felt like an empty fire extinguisher, his attorney said.

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This certainly does not justify his action and is not intended to, Stewart wrote.

More than 1,000 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the January 6 uprising. More than 600 of them have pleaded guilty or have been convicted after trials decided by a jury or judge. More than 450 of them have been convicted, with more than half serving prison terms ranging from seven days to ten years.

Five people died as a result of the January 6 riot and more than 100 police officers were injured.

Also Tuesday, a Nevada man who joined other rioters in assaulting police officers in a tunnel on the Lower West Terrace was sentenced to six years in prison. U.S. District Court Judge Carl J. Nichols also ordered Josiah Kenyon, 35, of Winnemucca, Nevada, to pay more than $43,000 in restitution for damaging a window in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Kenyon was dressed as the character Jack Skellington from the movie The Nightmare Before Christmas when he joined the mob attack. He used a table leg with a protruding nail to punch an officer in the leg and hit a second officer so hard that it lodged in the officer’s face shield and helmet, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors recommended a prison sentence of seven years and four months for Kenyon, who pleaded guilty to assault in September 2022.

Kenyon drove his wife and young children from Reno to Washington to attend Trump’s rally. Kenyon told FBI agents he hated Trump and went to the Capitol for trying to increase the level of violence, prosecutors wrote. the rioters.”