A former national guard cop charged with attacking police officers with chemical spray at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, pleaded guilty Thursday to felony offenses in federal court in Washington, D.C.
Gregory Yetman, 47, of Helmetta, had been indicted on six crimes related to the rioting that day, including assaulting police with a dangerous weapon. He pleaded guilty to a charge of assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers with physical contact.
Prosecutors accused Yetman of being part of a mob of rioters that surrounded Capital Police Officers on the West Terrace of the Capital building and eventually sprayed OC spray on the officers.
After about 12-14 seconds of spraying the officers with OC spray, authorities said he took out his cell phone and snapped videos of the mob at the Capital.
He then headed to the Lower West Terrace tunnel where rioters attempted to enter the building, authorities said.
Sentencing is scheduled for Jul. 22. The potential sentence he’s facing was not immediately clear.
He’s been in custody in Washington, D.C. since December, when he was transferred from a county jail in the Garden State.
Yetman was a fugitive for two days in early November after running into the woods behind his home when federal agents and local police arrived to arrest him on Jan. 6 crimes. He later surrendered to Monroe police.
He was a military police officer in the New Jersey Army National Guard from September 2008 to March 2022.
Just two weeks after Jan. 6, the FBI interviewed Yetman; the Army had tipped them off.
He told an agent he was at the Capitol that day, and he saw people breaking windows and a police officer being dragged into the mob. He tried to help people, he told the agents, who’d been sprayed with chemical irritants.
He also said, “he supports law enforcement and that anyone entering the Capitol or assaulting officers should be prosecuted,” authorities said.
Federal investigators, though, later learned they he was one of the people spraying chemicals.
Yetman was the man the FBI labeled “BOLO AFO-278,” who a police officer’s body camera captured assaulting multiple officers – including picking up a dropped pepper-spray canister and unleashing it on police.
The group “Sedition Hunters,” posted additional images of BOLO AFO-278 on their website and dubbed him #greenheavysprayer
He would go on to serve over a year more in the New Jersey National Guard after the FBI first visited him.
On social media, Yetman wrote openly about Jan. 6 and seemed to denounce the violence against fellow police officers. He said that as a “service member and military police soldier” he understood the Capitol officers’ job and could not condone the violence.
“To my brothers and sisters in blue, I’m sorry for what happened at the Capitol,” he wrote.
“There was a small faction that entered the Capitol and attacked officers,” he wrote, saying they were riled up by Antifa members who infiltrated the protest and “got the violence going.”
During a search of Yetman’s home after he fled in November, the FBI located several firearms, including large-capacity magazines which are illegal under New Jersey law. Police charged him separately with possessing them, and that case is ongoing in Middlesex County, a spokesperson for the county prosecutor’s office said this week.
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Kevin Shea may be reached at kshea@njadvancemedia.com.
