Prosecutors have a message for AZ Patriots leader Jennifer Harrison: You’re not getting off so easily this time.
Harrison, an alt-right firebrand, did not face charges after dozing a young girl with bear mace during a Black Lives Matter protest in Phoenix in June 2020. Tempe police say that she had done it again on July 3.
Harrison, 45, was arrested on suspicion of dozing pro-choice protesters in a mass of bears near a 4th of July celebration in Tempe Beach Park and initially faced two misdemeanor charges. But on Monday, Tempe city prosecutors dropped those charges to make way for possible felony charges.
After a two-week investigation, it was determined that “Harrison’s actions in pepper spraying protesters merited consideration for felony charges,” according to a joint statement from the Tempe prosecutors’ office and the Department of Justice. Tempe font.
City prosecutors dropped the misdemeanor charges and referred the upgraded felony charges to the Maricopa County District Attorney’s Office for review Thursday.
“The submission is currently being reviewed by our office,” said county attorney spokeswoman Jennifer Liewer. Phoenix New Times tuesday.
Liewer could not share the specific charges considered by the bureau.
Police say people were protesting on Mill Avenue and University Drive on July 3 “when a subject deployed what appeared to be pepper spray from a vehicle towards members of the crowd.”
Several passers-by captured the incident on video.
At the time, the department had not named a person of interest. But after a slew of photos and videos of the attack surfaced on social media, Harrison admitted his role in the attack and turned himself in to Tempe police four days later on minor charges. aggression and disorderly conduct.
She was quickly released.
In a tweet posted on his account deleted sinceHarrison claimed she sprayed bear mace from the passenger window because a protester “clearly didn’t like Jennifer and was saying profanities about Jennifer.”
Harrison also claimed that the protester reached the window of her car, at which point “it was unclear what her intentions were” and that another protester “approached the vehicle with her arms raised in a startling motion to rushing at Jennifer through the open window”.
Eyewitness accounts and videos of the altercation do not support any of these claims.
Harrison’s boyfriend Michael Pavlock, who was driving the car, was not charged in the incident, according to court records. Pavlock accompanied Harrison on his vigilante antics on the southern frontier and around the valley.
Dismissing the charges at the city level allows county prosecutors to review the felony charges in the case. If the county attorney declines to pursue the enhanced charges, Tempe prosecutors will reconsider the prosecution of the misdemeanor charges in the incident.
Tempe has one year from the date of the incident to bring misdemeanor charges against the AZ Patriots figurehead, who harassed migrants at the US-Mexico border and rallied against government restrictions in response to the global pandemic.
AZ Patriots is an “anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim extremist group,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Harrison made a name for himself for the organization with his guerrilla anti-protests, antagonizing protesters with opposing views and posting videos of the altercations on Facebook.
In 2019, with Harrison at the helm, the group snuck into Arizona Democratic Party headquarters in Phoenix claiming they were dropping off donations for asylum seekers. Instead, they left two bags of garbage apparently picked up along the border.
As a result, Facebook unpublished the group’s online page.
This prompted Harrison to join the Arizona Republican Party as a constituency committee member, later pretend to be a journalist in an attempt to infiltrate the Maricopa County Elections Department during the tabulation of ballots for the 2020 general election.
A month after the election, she was arrested on suspicion of impersonation after she used 45,000 reward points from her former father-in-law to book a hotel room in northern California to attend at a music festival.
She took a OK to avoid criminal charges.
Time will tell if she is lucky enough to dodge felony charges a second time.
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