Bruno Joseph Cua lives on a three-acre farm in central Georgia with his parents and two younger siblings. The 18-year-old likes to fish and build tree houses; neighbors, family friends, and classmates describe him as hard-working, kind, respectful, and patriotic. He’s not into drugs or alcohol—his biggest high last year was organizing Trump truck rallies in his community.
Before he traveled to Washington, D.C. on January 5 with his mom and dad to hear President Trump’s speech the next day, Bruno was finishing online classes to earn his high school diploma. (His mother, a veterinarian, stopped working years ago to homeschool her children.) Like many teenagers interested in politics, Bruno is a bit of a rabble-rouser and social media loudmouth.
The Cuas, after hearing the president’s speech on January 6, walked to Capitol Hill. Bruno made his way into the building; the teen later posted on Parler that he “stormed the capital (sic) with hundreds of thousands of patriots. Yes we physically fought our way in.”
Now, Bruno Cua sits in jail in Washington, D.C. awaiting trial for his involvement in the January 6 Capitol breach, the youngest of the nearly 300 people so far arrested under the U.S. Justice Department’s “unprecedented” investigation into the events of that day. Unlike tens of thousands of protestors who occupied the nation’s capital for months—including young people who bragged about it in a Washington Post magazine—Cua will be given no mercy.
Neither will his parents, Joseph and Alise.
A Social Media Menace?
Bruno was arrested on February 5 by FBI agents in Atlanta—a grand jury indicted the high schooler on 12 counts, including assaulting a police officer and possessing a “dangerous or deadly” weapon. For the first three weeks following his arrest, Cua languished in solitary confinement before being transported to a jail in Oklahoma City where he shared a cell with 30 other inmates. His family, like the families of dozens of January 6 defendants, has been denied the opportunity to post bail.
And there’s a chance the teen will remain behind bars until at least May when his trial is scheduled to begin. U.S. District Court Judge Randy Moss is weighing whether to finally release Bruno back to his parents or keep him detained for at least another two months. Moss seems inclined to side with government lawyers who insist Bruno is a danger to the community based on social media posts expressing outrage at the election, mocking Democrats including Joe Biden, and encouraging protestors to bring “pepper spray, tasers, baseball bats” to the capital—big talk for a kid traveling with his mom and dad. Some of the posts being used as evidence against him, in fact, are dated after January 6.
But, according to federal prosecutors, his rants on Parler make Bruno a national menace. “This small sample of public social media posts on the platform Parler by the defendant in this case evinces a full picture of who this defendant really is: a radicalized man with violent tendencies and no remorse for his participation in the violent insurrection that occurred at the U.S. Capitol,” assistant U.S. Attorney Kimberly Paschall wrote in objection to Bruno’s pretrial release.
read more:
https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/04/a-family-on-trial-for-january-6/
Replies
So unfair and so sad