A Southern California man who posted an Instagram photo of himself standing in a ransacked office inside the U.S. Capitol building during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot there was found guilty of obstruction and disorderly conduct charges on Friday, Aug. 19.
A jury found Erik Herrera, a 34-year-old photographer from El Cajon in San Diego County, guilty of obstructing the proceedings inside the Capitol to confirm President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. He was also found guilty on four additional counts related to his entering the Capitol building and his behavior once he got inside.
Possibly key to the jury’s verdict was a photo of Herrera posted of himself on his Instagram account. He’s wearing a gas mask and goggles inside an office in the Capitol, holding what appeared to be a stack of documents he found.
“I’m reclaiming Aztlan because I love America,” Herrera said in the photo’s caption.
The photo, which was included in an FBI affidavit submitted to a Washington, D.C. magistrate judge, showed Herrera amid a chaotic scene: Items inside the office were tossed on the ground, and another man was sitting with his feet up on the desk behind Herrera.
“I wasn’t thinking much,” Herrera told another Instagram user who messaged him the next day, according to the affidavit. “I just wanted a goofy ‘(expletive) you’ picture.”
A tipster identified Herrera to the FBI based on that photo. Two months after the attack, FBI agents served Facebook with a search warrant to let them in to Herrera’s account. According to the agents, Herrera also identified himself to them as the person in the photo. Following the search, he was arrested in August 2021 in Los Angeles.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Herrera faces up to 20 years in federal prison for the first count of obstructing an official proceeding, a felony. The four other counts, all misdemeanors, carry a maximum of three years combined.
However, among the hundreds of people convicted so far in the Jan. 6 insurrection, few have received sentences of more than a few months. Most of those convicted have been adherents to conspiracy theories, pushed by Donald Trump and others following his election defeat, that the 2020 vote was rigged.
But few have been identified as being part of extremist groups that planned the attack far in advance. The most serious sentences may be reserved for those militia and extremist group members who were at the Capitol that day.
On Aug. 1, Guy Reffitt, a Texas man who belonged to the extremist right-wing Three Percenters movement, was sentenced to seven years in prison for planning to disrupt the certification ceremony and carrying a gun with him. He was also found guilty of threatening his teenage son, who ultimately turned him into the FBI.
Reffitt’s seven-year sentence was the longest handed out to a Jan. 6 riot participant so far, according to multiple reports.
Herrera, according to the affidavit, said he rejected the official results of the 2020 election showing Biden defeated Trump. Agents didn’t say whether he belonged to any groups that attacked the Capitol.
The FBI said during the attack, Herrera wore a patch on his body armor that said “Press,” mimicking a pass worn by journalists to access official events. The agents said they “found no evidence that (Herrera) is a member of the news media or that he has published his photographs in any news outlet.”
A federal public defender for Herrera was not available for comment.
