Finally, a BML thug who burned five Seattle Police vehicles during a violent Black Lives Matter riot learned her fate.
Margaret Aislinn Channon, a 26-year-old from Tacoma, was sentenced to five years in prison for burning five police cars during the Seattle BLM riot on May 30, 2020.
KIRO7 reported the investigation was carried out by the FBI, ATF, and the Seattle Police Department. Channon was captured on video burning the cars in downtown Seattle. She was also filmed looting nearby department stores.
Channon used an aerosol can and fire as a blowtorch to carry out her destructive acts. Prosecutors noted “hundreds of people were standing in the vicinity of the police cars that Channon burned, some only a few feet away. All of them were in harm’s way if one of the vehicles had exploded.”
U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour told Channon she had done “tremendous damage to Black Lives Matter in Seattle.”
“The right to protest, gather, and call out injustices is one of the dearest and most important rights we enjoy in the United States,” said US Attorney Nick Brown.
“Indeed, our democracy depends on both exercising and protecting these rights. But Ms. Channon’s conduct was itself an attack on democracy. She used the cover of lawful protests to carry out dangerous and destructive acts, risking the safety of everyone around her and undermining the important messages voiced by others,” he continued.
According to the Department of Justice, Channon appears in videos from a downtown Seattle protest wearing “distinctive clothing and showing tattoos on her hands and arms.” Investigators were able to identify Channon because of these tattoos and clothing, as well as from information on her various social media accounts.
She was also seen entering a number of stores and stealing clothing and admitted to smashing the window of a Verizon store, entering a sandwich shop, and destroying an electric cash register.
More details of this report from AWM:
Channon was the fifth and final defendant to be convicted and sentenced in federal court related to Seattle unrest charges. In addition to the work she did on the police cruisers, Channon also confessed to smashing Verizon store windows and destroying a cash register at a sandwich shop.
Channon has since apologized for her crimes. She shared a message through a sentencing memo that her lawyer provided to the court.
“I apologize to the many workers and activists – who have given decades of their lives to building a countermeasure to police violence – that did not want to see fire,” Channon wrote. “I had intended to effect positive change, but my attempt was misguided.”
Channon’s mother, Elizabeth MacGahan, also came to the young white woman’s defense by writing a letter to the court. She claimed that Channon comes from a family with a commitment to civil service. She also said that the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the recent deaths of her two grandmothers might have contributed to the young woman’s violence.
“It’s a very difficult time to be young and sensitive and to suffer losses,”she said.
Channon was identified after the civil unrest because of high-quality images taken during the rampage. Investigators were able to identify her with a unique tattoo on her hand.
“She had the letters’ W-A-I-F’ tattooed on the fingers of her left hand… The letters were oriented such that the bottom of the letters faced towards her fingertips,” an indictment from 2020 reads.
Reportedly, defense attorneys and prosecutors agreed on recommending the five-year sentence as part of the plea agreement.
The Department of Justice stated that under the terms of the plea agreement, Channon is responsible for restitution. Channon will be on three years of supervised release following her prison term.
Watch the video report below for more details: