Two gunshots, a fatal stabbing, and the mystery man of the Capitol riot

(CNN) — Outside the US Capitol, he wore a red coat and held a gun. It was January 6, 2021, and the gunman stood on a scaffold above the west plaza as a flag-waving mob pressed against a police line. He raised the .38 revolver toward the gray-white sky and pulled the trigger. Once, twice. The gunshots made a dull cracking sound in the winter afternoon. Below him, a few rioters seemed to cheer faintly in response. The man yelled something to the crowd, waving the gun in his left hand. Then he put it away, climbed down the scaffold, and disappeared.

The gunman’s name was John Banuelos, according to federal authorities. Despite having evidence that he brought a gun to the riot, the FBI did not arrest him until three years later, after video footage of the gunfire appeared on the internet. He was still at large in July 2021, when he took part in a fight in Salt Lake City that left another man dead.

Among nearly 1,500 people who have been criminally charged in connection with the Capitol riot, Banuelos stands apart. A prosecutor wrote that he is “one of few defendants to have possessed a firearm, and the only known rioter to have fired it. Such behavior puts him in a class of his own.”

As I explored the mysteries of Banuelos and his many brushes with the justice system, I reached out to the family of Christopher Senn, the 19-year-old who was killed by Banuelos in an incident that the authorities called self-defense. I sent a text message to Victoria Thomas, a retired school principal who took in Senn as a foster child and treated him like her son. She wrote back almost immediately.

“Chris did not deserve to be killed and no one should get away with killing anyone,” she said, “but John got away with it and probably will hurt someone else.”

I found police and court records that show a startling pattern involving Banuelos. He is accused of a violent crime. He is arrested. Sometimes witnesses fail to appear in court. Sometimes the charges are dropped for other reasons not explained in court dockets. Sometimes he’s found guilty and sentenced to probation or supervision. One way or another, he goes free. And the cycle begins again.

Over the years, according to reports I obtained, various people made the following accusations against Banuelos. He kicked and punched someone who was waiting for the school bus. He tried to push someone out of a moving vehicle. He dragged a woman out of a car by her hair. He bit a boy on the ear. He trespassed in the apartment of a woman who came home to find him there, along with a Doberman Pinscher. He told his girlfriend he would beat her if she called the police.

None of these cases resulted in jail or prison sentences. A rap sheet from the Chicago Police Department lists 20 of his arrests in Illinois, most of them for misdemeanors, and only one jail sentence, of 90 days, after he fled from a police officer in a motor vehicle.

Banuelos is 39. He has struggled with homelessness and substance abuse. A 2023 police report said he’d been admitted to a hospital’s psychiatric unit for undisclosed reasons.

But the most striking part of his story unfolded over 180 days in 2021, from January 6 to Independence Day.

In those days after the gunfire at the Capitol riot, both local and federal authorities had information that might have diverted Banuelos from Liberty Park in Salt Lake City — and away from his fateful meeting with Chris Senn.

Chris Senn was a survivor — until the day he met John Banuelos

Long after Chris was gone, his best friend remembered the frozen mouse. The story hinted at Chris’ tragic relationship with the world, his brief and sometimes beautiful quest to make the pieces fit.

They were boys who met in a group foster home in Utah around age 6. One winter morning, as they waited for the school bus, Chris noticed something in a garbage can. A mouse. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. It was clear to Gabe Hamilton that Chris was not planning mischief. He wanted to save the mouse. But the mouse was frozen, beyond all help. At school, when he pulled it out of his pocket, a teacher screamed.

Chris could be jarring like that. As he grew older, big and strong for his age, he asserted himself with crushing handshakes. He liked his food spicy and acidic, splashed with hot sauce or lemon juice, a thing to be enjoyed but also survived.

What had he survived as a little boy? His body hinted at something frightening. There were scars on his back, strange marks on his legs. When the Thomas family of Taylorsville took him in as a foster child at age 9, he told them he’d been burned, whipped, chained and starved. Victoria Thomas, his foster mother, helped him write a children’s book about his experiences.

“One day you decide there is more to life than you know,” he wrote. “There is a God! You are a child of God so you pray and forgive others even though they won’t admit what they did.”

Chris was one of those people whose story only grows larger after they’re gone. When we met for breakfast, Victoria Thomas, her husband Randall and their grown-up daughter Talisha did their best to hold it together while sharing their favorite memories of Chris. The way he carried a toy poodle named Toro almost everywhere he went, other than church. That time he heard a song that reminded him of Talisha, so then he called and sang it to her. Those nine years in which he consistently delivered Sunday dinner to the elderly woman who lived next door.

“I loved every minute I had with Chris,” Victoria said. “Every minute.”

In the book, Chris wrote about his challenges at school.

“You get frustrated and scared so you run, hit and bite.…then the school kicks you out and the school district won’t let you return.”

The Thomases home-schooled him for a while. He worked with Randall at Randall’s Market, a grocery store that also sold fireworks. Chris and a friend got summer passes to an amusement park, where he preferred the biggest and wildest roller coasters. As a teenager, Chris started vaping. The Thomases told him he couldn’t vape at home. Chris moved out. He took a tent and a sleeping bag. In February 2021, he was accused of assaulting a woman. That case would later be dismissed after his own death.

One day in 2021, Chris came back to the house. Without asking for permission, he gathered pots, pans, zucchini from the garden, meat from the freezer. He’d been living in a park in downtown Salt Lake City, and he’d decided to cook for his hungry new friends.

July 4th was a big day at Randall’s Market. Customers streamed in to buy fireworks. Chris had agreed to work a shift there that day, but he didn’t show up. He called Victoria to ask for a copy of his book, but he didn’t say why. Usually, she would drop everything and do whatever he asked. Take him to get a haircut or whatever. But she was too busy to break away.

Later on, two police officers showed up at the market to deliver some news.

“Chris was always looking out and protecting others,” his sister Talisha said almost three years later, reading aloud for me what she’d written for his funeral. “He died a hero’s death.”

Banuelos fell off law enforcement’s radar until he reappeared as a rioter on January 6

John Banuelos is a man very few people want to talk about. The FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the District of Columbia declined my interview requests, which they typically do for ongoing investigations. The Salt Lake City Police Department also declined, even though its investigation into Senn’s death was complete. I contacted several people who know Banuelos. None agreed to be interviewed.

His attorney Michael Lawlor did not respond to multiple calls and emails in the course of three months, including one requesting permission to interview Banuelos at the DC Jail. The Federal Bureau of Prisons — which had pre-trial custody of Banuelos for several weeks after his arrest in March on charges related to the Capitol riot — declined my request to interview Banuelos. When I asked if the request had been relayed to him, the prison official did not reply.

Nevertheless, a rough sketch of his life can be drawn from a trove of police and court records gathered from more than half a dozen jurisdictions. His first known adult arrest came in 2003, when he was 18, on a charge of domestic battery with bodily harm. He was arrested at least twice that year in Illinois, twice the next year, twice in 2006, four times in 2007, and nine more times between 2008 and 2013.

At least two police reports link Banuelos with the Satan’s Disciples, a predominantly Hispanic street gang that operates in and around Chicago. The reports give no indication that he played an important role in the gang, or that his alleged acts of violence had any gang connection. He was often seen intoxicated, violating some liquor or drug law. In 2014, the year he turned 30, he was accused of snorting heroin in a Burger King. The report said he told a police officer, “Maybe I did this out in the open like this as a cry for help.”

It appears he left the state not long after that. Police reports placed him in Utah in 2016 and 2017, in familiar settings that involved alcohol, drugs and domestic violence.

And then something shifted. The pattern was disrupted. Years went by, and databases in Chicago and Salt Lake City showed no new arrests. Had he quietly moved somewhere else? Had he temporarily changed his ways? With 2020 came the coronavirus pandemic, the summer of George Floyd, the tumultuous aftermath of a presidential election. On January 6, 2021, John Banuelos resurfaced. He was photographed outside the U.S. Capitol, wearing a white cowboy hat that said TRUMP 2020.

The many public records I reviewed contain no explanation of how an alleged Satan’s Disciple associate from the streets of Chicago became a rioter on behalf of former president Donald Trump. They don’t say how a man with a history of poverty and homelessness traveled more than 2,000 miles from his last known address, in the deadliest phase of the pandemic, to join the attack on the Capitol. Nor do they say what purpose was served when Banuelos climbed the scaffold and fired the gun.

The reports do say he was conspicuous at the riot, in pictures and video, in his boots, black jeans, black knee pads secured with bungee cords, various black and red outerwear, and the Trump cowboy hat adorned with stars and stripes. He was seen on CCTV footage “pointing at officers and kicking the metal barricade,” according to an FBI agent’s affidavit. He held up a gloved hand, made the shape of a “finger gun,” and pretended to fire at officers. With other rioters, he tried to breach the police line. He raised his jacket to reveal the gun in his waistband.

Returning to Salt Lake City by unknown methods, Banuelos resumed his frequent appearances in local police reports. Less than a month later, a woman told police she was afraid she “might get in trouble for harboring a fugitive.” She said Banuelos “is visible on a YouTube video of the Capitol riots with a firearm.” She said she’d thought of calling the FBI. She said Banuelos had smashed a computer, apparently because he was afraid of its camera.

In a phone conversation with an officer, Banuelos denied breaking the computer. He was not arrested or charged. It’s not clear whether anyone from the Salt Lake City police shared information with the FBI about his alleged presence at the Capitol riot. The police declined to answer my questions about that.

Two days later, on February 4, 2021, someone called the National Threat Operations Center to say Banuelos was the man in a photograph “on a website of persons wanted in connection with the riot at the U.S. Capitol,” according to an FBI affidavit. The witness had watched a video from Vice News and recognized Banuelos “pushing against officers and flashing a gun.”

Neither of these reports had any immediate effect. The FBI was busy with the largest criminal investigation in American history. Tips poured in. Nearly 1,500 suspects would eventually be arrested, and hundreds of others are still at large. Despite clear visual evidence that showed him with a gun at the riot, Banuelos remained free.

Five months later, a fight broke out at a park in Salt Lake City. As the violence escalated, John Banuelos stabbed Chris Senn to death.

‘He’ll probably be going to jail,’ a detective said. But a prosecutor called the stabbing self-defense

On a sweltering Independence Day afternoon, someone called 911. The first officers arrived at Liberty Park less than two minutes after they were dispatched. An officer ran down a hill to find a young man lying on the ground with blood on his shirt and an open wound in his chest.

Chris Senn had a weak pulse. For the moment, he was alive. The officer and a bystander performed CPR. The officer looked into Chris’s eyes, talking to him, trying to keep him conscious. Then the officer saw something change in those eyes, and he knew Chris was gone.

There was no mystery about who’d done the stabbing. The police found Banuelos sitting on the hillside, not far from a bloody knife. The only real questions were how it happened, and why. They began interviewing witnesses.

The story that emerged was rife with contradictions, although some facts were undisputed. Banuelos had been staying in the park with a woman he called his wife. The couple did not seem well-liked among residents of the park. As one witness put it, “They come over here asking for cigarettes like, ‘Oh, can I have a cigarette?’ Or, ‘Can I have a sip of your beer?’ Or, ‘Can I have your water?’… They just come here and just kind of take from the park a little bit and irritate people and cuss at people and yell at them.”

In the hours before the stabbing, Banuelos was accused of stealing $100 or $150 from a younger, smaller man. This may have been a false accusation. A detective found reasons to doubt what the alleged victim said. Regardless, the claim of theft seemed to turn the park’s residents against Banuelos and his female companion. Several men got together and told Banuelos he had to leave. One man in this faction was Chris Senn.

On the question of who started the violence, witnesses were divided. Some said Senn and his friends surrounded Banuelos and forced him to defend himself. Others blamed Banuelos.

“Yeah, so when we walked up, he had already threatened multiple people,” one witness told police. “…And he pulled out a knife and says, ‘I’m going to stab every single one of you,’ and started slashing at each individual person.”

This witness had a kind of skateboard called a longboard. He said he threw the board at Banuelos after Banuelos slashed at him with the knife. The witness said, “He tried to stab me and Chris pushed him off me and he stabbed Chris.”

Another witness thought Banuelos should go to prison.

“You probably can’t tell me this,” she said to a detective, “but you’re going to put that guy away, right, for a long time?”

“He’ll probably be going to jail, most likely,” the detective said. “I mean, I’m not in charge of everything.”

“I know you can’t tell me that, but I just want to make sure that something happens to him,” the witness said. “Because what he did was so unnecessary.”

Banuelos was bleeding when the officers took him into custody. He said he’d been hit with a skateboard. At the hospital, he received stitches for a gash above his left eye. There, according to an officer’s report, Banuelos said this to nurse:

“A group of people surrounded me and my wife and began to attack us, so someone died.”

“More accurate, I murdered him.”

Banuelos asks if he should tell the FBI to come and get him. A detective says no

Later that day at police headquarters, two detectives spoke to John Banuelos. He was hesitant at first, but they gave him two cigarettes and he agreed to talk.

“I’m pretty sure I’m not here for no reason, right?” he said. “I’m here because something happened to that kid. He’s dead, right? Murdered, right? Okay. Well, what was his name?”

“Chris,” a detective said.

Banuelos denied stealing any money. He said it was all a setup, and he’d been afraid for his life.

“I can’t remember if I fell and then went like that or what, but the kid had a stick, another kid hit me with a skateboard, and everything went scary from there, like adrenaline, life or death. I was just going like crazy. … I was bleeding from my head real bad. By that time, they took the kid over there, and they still kept coming towards me.”

The detectives listened, occasionally clarifying his story with questions. About 40 minutes in, the conversation took a strange turn.

“Describe what you defended yourself with,” a detective said.

“Okay, I’m from Chicago,” Banuelos replied. “I was in the D.C. riots. You can look me up, okay? The FBI hasn’t came and got me yet, okay?”

“Okay,” one detective said. Neither asked any follow-up questions then about the “D.C. riots” or the FBI. They gently steered the conversation elsewhere.

Minutes later, Banuelos steered it back.

“Man,” he said, “should I just tell the FBI to come get me or what the f**k?”

“No,” said Det. Steven Parisot.

“Do you have a warrant?” asked Det. Weldon Wilson.

“Probably,” Banuelos said. (The FBI had shared photographs of him on a website seeking tips about unidentified Capitol riot suspects. His federal arrest warrant was not signed until almost three years later.)

“From the FBI?” Parisot asked.

“Well, yeah, I was in the D.C. riots,” Banuelos said.

“On January 6th?” Parisot asked.

“January 6th,” Banuelos said.

“Okay,” Wilson said.

“Did you go inside the Capitol?” Parisot asked.

“Yeah,” Banuelos said, “I went inside and I’m the one with the video with the gun right here.”

It’s unknown whether or when anyone from the Salt Lake City Police Department told the FBI about this conversation. Neither the FBI (per its usual protocol) nor the police department would answer my questions about it. But the Salt Lake City police did issue a statement. It reads, in part,

“While we have engaged in discussions with federal law enforcement about Mr. John Banuelos, we are unable to provide insight into the nature of those discussions.”

The district attorney explains why Banuelos wasn’t charged

One public official did talk with me about John Banuelos. Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill reviewed the evidence in the fatal stabbing of Chris Senn and spoke with me by phone about his conclusions. He said the incident was captured on video, from the cellphone of a bystander perhaps 10 or 15 feet away, and this video was crucial in his decision not to charge Banuelos with a crime.

He said the video showed an aggressive crowd around Banuelos, and “there’s a moment where he’s on a bike, he tries to pick up his bike and kind of move, but the crowd is sort of circling him. … He’s attacked with a skateboard. And then the fight is on from there, and the crowd kind of moves, and then the crowd is moving towards him, and he’s sort of swinging and trying to defend himself.”

When I asked if he could release the video, Gill suggested filing a records request with the Salt Lake City Police Department.

I told him the police had declined to release the video, citing the FBI investigation.

“That may very well be the case,” Gill said, adding that sometimes agencies can withhold records for ongoing investigations.

I asked about the report from earlier in 2021 when a woman told police she was worried she might be harboring a fugitive because she believed Banuelos had participated in the Capitol riot. In that case, one of Gill’s assistants declined to prosecute Banuelos for allegedly destroying the computer. (A letter cited “evidentiary issues” and said a conviction would be unlikely.)

“Did anybody from this office reach out to the FBI?” Gill said. “My answer is no, they probably did not, because they were probably — the screening unit was just looking at the underlying destruction of property charge.”

I asked if the police detectives should have alerted the FBI after Banuelos suggested the FBI should come and get him.

“Yeah,” Gill said. “You know, I mean, again, that’s a legitimate question for the police to sort of answer why they didn’t do that.”

I mentioned to Gill that there were several unanswered questions regarding Banuelos and the FBI. The prosecutor did nothing to discourage that line of inquiry.

“We get to ask those questions from our public officials and our public institutions and … as I, tell my colleagues, we have the privilege of being public servants,” he said. “And that means we have an obligation to share that information, regardless of how it lands or how it is.”

“And I don’t think we do ourselves favors by being cute or not being transparent, you know?”

The video surfaces, and the FBI takes action

In February 2022, Salt Lake City news outlet KSL published a story reporting that Banuelos brought a gun to the Capitol riot and disclosing what he’d told police after the fatal stabbing. NBC News followed with a story of its own. Neither story resulted in his arrest.

The FBI did contact him in March, according to a court filing. “Banuelos told agents he would not speak with them but stated he did not go inside the Capitol,” a prosecutor later wrote. “Banuelos hung up and then called agents making incoherent sentences saying people were trying to trick him and were messing with his mind.”

Meanwhile, hundreds of others were arrested for their participation in the riot. Some had been unarmed and nonviolent.

Only nine days after January 6, FBI agents visited Gary Wickersham, an 81-year-old Army veteran who entered the Capitol that day. He was arrested that May. By the end of 2021, he’d been sentenced to three years’ probation.

It took FBI agents less than four months to interview Rebecca Lavrenz, 71, a Colorado woman known as the “Praying Grandma.” She spent 10 minutes inside the Capitol on January 6. Lavrenz was charged in late 2022 and convicted in April 2024. She was sentenced in August to a year of probation — including six months’ home confinement, according to her attorney — and ordered to pay a $103,000 fine.

Three years passed, and John Banuelos remained free. In January 2024, an FBI agent questioned Banuelos about a threatening message he’d apparently sent on X, formerly known as Twitter. But the agent did not arrest him then.

And then the situation changed.

Derrick Evans was a West Virginia legislator who’d been sent to jail for his own role in the Capitol riot. After his release, he ran unsuccessfully for Congress. And after one of his speeches, someone approached him with what seemed to be new evidence about January 6. This person, whom Evans declined to identify, claimed to have cellphone video of someone standing outside the Capitol, firing a gun.

“And to be honest with you, I only halfway believed this person,” Evans told me in a phone interview. “…I said, ‘Can you show me?’ And they showed me, and I said, ‘Oh my goodness.’ Like, you know, this was — it was incredible.”

The video seemed to change the narrative of January 6. To that point, none of the hundreds or thousands of rioters had been accused of firing a gun. Now Evans had video showing a man in a red coat climbing a scaffold, pulling out a handgun, and firing twice into the air.

Evans said he agonized over whether to publicize the video. But he was disturbed by the man’s reckless use of a firearm.

“And, quite frankly, anyone who did what he did should be held accountable because, you know, as someone who grew up with guns and supports our Second Amendment, the sheer negligence that he showed on his part in doing that,” Evans said. “No responsible gun owner would watch that video and say that that was okay to do that.”

On February 8, 2024, Evans posted on X,

I have exclusive footage of a man climbing the scaffolding on the west side of the Capitol on January 6th. He then pulls out a gun, & fires two rounds in to the air before climbing back down.

We are adding some final edits to the video before releasing it later today.

One month later, the FBI arrested Banuelos. He was captured on March 8 near Chicago on charges that included discharging a firearm on Capitol grounds. The statement of facts from the Justice Department included a screenshot from the video posted by Derrick Evans.

Afterward, Evans was puzzled by the government’s handling of the Banuelos case. He wondered why Banuelos remained free that long — and what would have happened if he hadn’t released the video.

“Were they ever going to arrest him?”

Banuelos faces a judge and says, ‘I’m not worried’

“Good afternoon, Mr. Banuelos,” US District Judge Tanya Chutkan said on May 20. “I am Judge Chutkan. Your case has been assigned to me. Can you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Banuelos said, taking part in in an arraignment hearing by videoconference from a federal detention facility in Chicago. “You’re looking lovely.”

“Well, thank you,” the judge said.

Judge Chutkan is also overseeing the federal case accusing former President Trump of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Now, facing Banuelos, she went through some procedural matters. He’d been indicted on six criminal charges and was being held without bail. His attorney Michael Lawlor entered a plea of not guilty and asked for a speedy trial. Banuelos said he wanted to represent himself.

“Ma’am,” he said, “it’s hard for me to trust my lawyers.”

“I understand,” Chutkan said.

“It’s like people have some sort of agenda, like they’re playing a game of chess — ”

“I am going to interrupt you,” the judge said, but Banuelos continued. He seemed as perplexed as anyone else by how long it had taken the FBI to come and get him.

“I’ve been out for four years, ma’am, and they come get me now? They’ve known where I was at. They had my phone number.”

“None of this makes sense,” he said.

“You’re in too much trouble to be joking around, Mr. Banuelos,” the judge said a few minutes later. “You’re in too much trouble — ”

Banuelos cut in.

“Well,” he said, “President Trump’s going to be in office six months from now, so I’m not worried about it.”

Three months later, at another court appearance on August 21, Banuelos did not sound so defiant. He’d been moved to the DC Jail and the judge ordered him detained until his trial, tentatively scheduled for next February. A grand jury had indicted him on new charges related to the illegal use of a firearm.

“It was a very, very poor choice,” said Lawlor, his attorney, “but he did not mean to do anyone any harm that day.”

As Lawlor continued, he hinted at why Banuelos did what he did at the Capitol riot.

“I hate to use the word ‘festive’ because that sounds silly, but I think the court knows, in some corners — New Year’s Eve, for example — in this city at midnight, ShotSpotter goes wild because people fire guns all around the city.”

“And people get hurt,” Judge Chutkan said.

“I understand,” Lawlor said.

“I’ve defended people who fired those shots,” Chutkan said.

“I understand,” Lawlor said. “But all’s I mean to say by that is Mr. Banuelos’ intentions were not violent.”

“He was carried away by the spirit of the moment,” the judge said.

“At that time,” Lawlor said. “And I think the court will learn later that he no longer believes in the things that caused him to be so emotive that day.”

Victoria Thomas was stunned when she read the police report

The Salt Lake City Cemetery sits on 122 acres in the foothills above the city, with beautiful views of the Salt Lake Valley and surrounding mountains. Victoria Thomas goes there about once a week, to make sure Chris’ grave is clean. The back of the headstone says, “Love you more,” among other inscriptions, a reference to a conversation Chris and Victoria often had.

“I love you,” she would tell him.

“I love you more,” he would say.

Not long after he died, she read the police report and was stunned to find out what Banuelos told the detectives about the FBI and the Capitol riot.

“I was just devastated,” she said. “I was like, ‘How can somebody that’s wanted by the FBI get away with murdering somebody?’”

About two months after the stabbing, Banuelos turned up at a gas station in Provo, Utah. A clerk told police he’d seen Banuelos pull a woman to the ground, where she hit her head on the concrete. Banuelos was arrested on charges that included domestic violence assault. He later failed to appear in court, and a judge issued a warrant for his arrest. Three years later, that warrant is still active.

When we met for breakfast a few months ago, Randall and Victoria Thomas were talking about the mysteries of the justice system and the man who kept falling through its cracks.

“Chances are he’ll go to jail,” Randall said, “but not for killing anybody.”

“But at least he’ll be put away and not hurt other people,” Victoria said.

“Yeah,” Randall said.

“Because he hurts people,” Victoria said. “And gets away with it.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.