A 24-year-old Texas man admitted in federal court that he traveled to Minneapolis solely to create mayhem during social unrest that followed former police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd.
According to Minneapolis Public Radio, Ivan Harrison Hunter of Boerne, Texas pleaded guilty Thursday to one charge of rioting–which is punishable by up to five years in prison. Hunter is associated with the “Boogaloo Bois,” a far-right group that the Southern Poverty Law Center says has racist origins.
Per MPR:
Hunter admitted that he fired 13 rounds from an AK-47-style rifle into the 3rd precinct police station on May 28, 2020, as other rioters looted and set fire to the building after police evacuated. No one was struck by the gunfire.
After shooting at the building, Hunter was recorded on video high-fiving another person and yelling “Justice for Floyd!” Investigators matched the skull mask Hunter was wearing in the video to a photo on his Facebook page.
MPR reports that Hunter corresponded on Facebook with two other Boogaloo Bois–Benjamin Teeter and Michael Solomon–and arrived in Minneapolis days after Floyd’s death. Solomon and Teeter’s names previously appeared on The Root after they attempted to sell weapons to an overseas terrorist organization and ended up meeting with an undercover federal informant instead.
The Associated Press reports that Hunter was a passenger in a pickup truck pulled over by police in Austin, Texas on June 3, 2020. Hunter was wearing a tactical vest that had six loaded magazines for a semiautomatic rifle in it, per the AP, and there were multiple other firearms in the truck.
More from the AP:
Hunter was arrested several days later, after agents learned of his online affiliation with another person with ties to the boogaloo movement, Steven Carrillo. Federal prosecutors have charged Carrillo in the death of a federal protective officer in Oakland, California, during a protest over Floyd’s death.
Boogaloo supporters, who use the loose movement’s name as a slang term for a second civil war or collapse of civilization, frequently show up at protests armed with rifles and wearing Hawaiian shirts under body armor.
MPR reports that a sentencing hearing for Hunter will be scheduled after a “standard pre-sentence investigation.”