Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
These officers danced at BLM rally
Months later they joined Trump crowd to storm US Capitol
ROCKY MOUNT, Va. — One sunny day last spring, Bridgette Craighead was dancing the Electric Slide with three police officers in the grass next to the farmers market. It was the first Black Lives Matter protest this rural Virginia county had ever had, and Craighead, a 29-year-old hairdresser, had organized it.
She had not known what to expect.
But when the officers arrived, they were friendly. They held her signs high and stood next to her, smiling. Later an officer brought pizzas and McDonald’s Happy Meals. They even politely ignored her cousin’s expired license plate.
This, she thought, was the best of America.
Police officers and Black Lives Matter activists laughing and dancing together. They were proving that, in some small way, their Southern county with its painful past was changing. They had gotten beyond the racist ways of older people.
This made her feel proud. In a photograph from that day, Sgt. Thomas Robertson is smiling, and Craighead is standing behind him, her face tilted toward the sun and her fist held high.
She did not see the officers around Rocky Mount much after that.
But in early January, someone sent her a photograph. It showed Officer Jacob Fracker and Robertson posing inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, the day the building was stormed by Donald Trump supporters.
At first, she did not believe it. Not her officers. But there they were. She confronted them on Facebook, and they did not deny it.
What came next happened fast.
The officers were arrested, their homes searched and their guns confiscated. Residents yelled at one another outside the municipal building while the Town Council was inside debating the officers’ jobs. Craighead and her hair salon received threatening messages. The officers did too. Everybody, it seemed, was angry.
From the best of America to the worst of America. That was Franklin County over the past year.
But what happens now? Fracker, 29, and Robertson, 48, both veterans, one who served in Afghanistan, the other in Iraq, say they did not participate in any of the violence that happened at the Capitol that day, when scores of people were hurt and five lost their lives. The charges they face — disorderly conduct and disrupting the proceedings of Congress — are nonviolent and less serious than those facing people accused of assaulting police officers. They went to Washington to express their views, and they say they went to war so Craighead would be able to express hers too.
“I can protest for what I believe in and still support your protest for what you believe in,” Fracker wrote on Facebook after the riot, adding, “After all, I fought for your right to do it.”
The arrests of Fracker and Robertson, who both declined to speak for this article, have divided this county at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Their supporters say that the violence of the riot was wrong, but that the sentiment of the rally that day — protesting an election that many here believe, wrongly, was stolen — was honorable.
But others in the county say that the officers’ participation looked a lot like history repeating itself: white people going out of their way to make sure that America was theirs.
In Franklin County, a mountainous corner of southwest Virginia of about 56,000, this took the form of the Ku Klux Klan marching in the 1960s. Trump and the Capitol rioters, they argue, were merely the most recent iterations.
“People are not going to give up their power,” said Penny Blue, an African American woman who lives in Franklin County and whose father was also a Franklin County native. “They’re going to do whatever it takes to keep that power. And that is what is going on right now.”
If you ask Black people in Franklin County, many will tell you that the current chapter begins with the election of Barack Obama.
David Finney, a retired police officer, remembers a sudden resentfulness.
“For years, I thought people hated Obama because of Obamacare, but at some point I realized it didn’t have a damned thing to do with no insurance,” said Finney, who is Black. “White people hated Obama because he was a Black man who became president and elevated the Black race. Obama leveled the playing field. And that was a problem because before that, most white people truly felt that America belonged to them.”
Aaron Hodges, who saw combat when he was in the Army, remembers Fracker from high school. Hodges, 29, works in construction. Fracker joined the police. But in many ways, the men are the same, Hodges said.
“He was just like me,” Hodges said.
Fracker, he added, should not be put in prison. “He wanted to serve the country and he did. And now he’s getting eaten up by our country.”
In 2019, news of proposed gun restrictions in the state Legislature caught Hodges’ attention. Hodges was sick of people complaining about the government but never doing anything about it. So, he decided to hold a militia muster, a call for able-bodied men. Several hundred people showed up in a public park one day last March.
Gun rights were on everybody’s mind. Two months before, on a frigid January morning, thousands of people converged on the grounds of Virginia’s Statehouse in Richmond, to protest what they said were dangerous proposals by Democrats. One of those protesters was Robertson.
Robertson served as a soldier in Iraq and Kuwait starting in 2007, according to the Army. Later, he worked as a contractor in Afghanistan. He was “the alpha male inside the department,” said Justin Smith, who previously worked under Robertson but has since left the police department.
Smith said Robertson was good to his officers. He was politically conservative, “but not in some big South-willrise-again way,” Smith said. “He’s more like, ‘I’m not going to be told what to do.’ ”
He said Robertson refused to wear a body camera, contrary to department policy, and “was big into Second Amendment rights.”
Hodges does not know Robertson, nor has he kept up with Fracker. But he thinks he understands why they might have gone to Washington on Jan. 6. It was the same reason he started the militia.
“Just stand up for yourself,” he said. “Say no. Not just to the government taking your rights or property. But to anyone who tries to take advantage of you.”
Hodges also went to the Capitol on Jan. 6. But what was he standing up to?
He talked about a sense of loss. The old America “that is honor-bound and that had chivalry” is gone, he said.