‘I respect police officers’: Ex-Navy interpreter once commended for service sentenced to prison for Jan. 6 police assault

Matthew DaSilva was an interpreter for the U.S. Navy commended for his record while serving after Sept. 11 but on Jan. 6, 2021, he stormed the U.S. Capitol bearing a flagpole to jab at police as he joined other rioters to dislodge officers from a tunnel where some of the most violent attacks of the day unfolded.

This week, DaSilva was sentenced to just over two years in prison.

He will receive credit for nine months served since he was first convicted last year. His defense attorney only asked for three months of incarceration, but that was rejected.

The 51-year-old from Lavon, Texas, learned his fate Tuesday when he appeared before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, an appointee of former President Donald Trump. In a sentencing memorandum filed last fall, prosecutors asked for 52 months in prison, or just over four years.

Nichols found DaSilva guilty last July on felony assault and civil disorder charges. He also found him guilty on a variety of misdemeanor charges including an act of physical violence on Capitol grounds, according to a statement from the Justice Department.

At DaSilva’s bench trial, prosecutors said he made his way to the west plaza of the Capitol around 2:35 p.m. on Jan. 6 and marched over toward Capitol Police defending the lower west terrace tunnel entryway.

He was holding a flagpole, waving a large blue flag and joined other rioters who were “engaging in a group ‘heave-ho’ maneuver,” the Justice Department said. Footage showed DaSilva grabbing one officer’s riot shield and yanking it away before flailing his arms at police as they deployed pepper spray to keep him back.

Other footage from the attack on the Capitol shows DaSilva using the full weight of his body to crush himself up against police, helping to sustain the crowd’s blockade at the tunnel entry. Court records indicate that at one point during the melee as he tried to wrestle a riot shield away from an officer, he knocked that officer off balance for a moment and in that window, a desk drawer was thrown directly at that officer’s head by someone else.

In a sentencing memorandum from his defense lawyer, DaSilva asked for leniency, noting his 12 years of service as a cryptologic technician interpreter who was honorably discharged.

He received a Joint Service Commendation Medal, a Navy/Marine Corps Achievement Medal, Good Conduct Medals, a National Defense Service Medal and a Navy Unit Commendation among others, and his lawyer wrote, DaSilva was once “personally congratulated … for representing the military and beating out Ivy League graduates in a prestigious Mandarin Chinese linguistic operation competition.”

Attorney Marina Medvin wrote that in 2005 while he was deployed in the Pacific, DaSilva was commended for using his own shirt as a bandage to render first aid to a child who was “bleeding profusely” after lacerating his foot. Then, DaSilva reunited the boy with his parents.

As for his conduct on Jan. 6, DaSilva told the court that he “never intended to hurt any officer” or “inflict any kind of harm.”

“I am an introvert and I am easily overpowered by a lot of stimuli,” he said in a statement provided along with his attorney’s sentencing proposal. “I had a very difficult time processing that day. I have a very difficult time with a lot of noise. There was a lot of noise and chaos. I don’t have an explanation for why I stayed there. I came there alone and I trusted the crowd, people I didn’t know,” he said.

He also expressed “regret interacting with the officers in the manner that I did,” he said.

“I respect police officers. Obviously, if I could do this all over again, I would not have remained in that chaos and I wouldn’t have interacted with the officers. I would have just gone home. It’s a hard lesson. I deeply regret putting my hands on that shield. The man who you saw in that video is not who I am and not who I want to be,” he said.

Once he made it home to Texas after Jan. 6, DaSilva claimed he collapsed into his wife’s arms, crying and remorseful for his actions. His sentencing memo noted that he “cut his hair and shaved his untamed facial hair” and started devoting his time to more important things, like his wife.

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