A New York mother and son have been charged with theft in helping a man steal a laptop from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office during the January 6 Capitol insurrection, with the mother saying the man who stole the laptop "scared" her.
Maryann Mooney-Rondon, 55, and her son, Rafael Rondon, 23, of Watertown, New York, were arrested Friday by the FBI in connection with the stolen laptop after a home raid for the computer in Alaska, according to court documents.
Mooney-Rondon allegedly admitted to being in the Capitol and Pelosi's conference room the day of the riot, the documents said. She allegedly provided gloves or a scarf to a man who wanted to steal the laptop without leaving fingerprints.
"He asked, he said, give me—I don't know if it was gloves or a scarf I was wearing—and like I said he scared me," the documents quoted her as saying.
The man then allegedly used Mooney-Rondon's scarf or gloves to put the laptop from Pelosi's office into a backpack.
For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below:
Both mother and son also face other charges related to the riot at the Capitol.
Rafael Rondon also faces possession of an unregistered sawed-off shotgun charge.
Both appeared in federal court Friday in Syracuse, New York, and released pending further proceedings, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of New York.
A message left at a listing for Mooney-Condon in Watertown was not immediately returned Monday. Attempts to locate Rafael Rondon were not immediately successful.
The Capitol riot was well documented by those who took part. Law enforcement used photos from the social media accounts of those who took part to search for the suspects.
A tip to the FBI led them to the mother and son, according to a statement of facts documented by an unnamed FBI special agent.
There was an ethernet connected to the computer, Rondon told FBI agents.
"If I recall, the guy was going to yank it out. I'm like, dude, don't do that, I mean that's, I mean just the computer, you can't pull the cables out, it'll ruin everything," Mooney-Rondon said, according to the document.
Mooney-Rondon then said she believed she saw the man put the computer in his backpack. Her son told investigators that he thought he might have pushed the computer "in his bag a little bit using a glove 'cause he didn't want to get his fingerprints on it," the document said.
"So I assisted him a little bit, and that was probably stupid of me," he's quoted in the document as saying.
She and her son then went to the Senate Gallery and then left the building when they saw it was overrun with protesters.
Rafael Rondon told officers that he and mother took the metro into Washington on January 6 "because I'm not taking my car into the city which, the Capitol building I'm about to break into," the FBI agent's statement alleged.
Both mother and son admitted they were the ones depicted in the photos taken at the Capitol during the riots and distributed by the FBI, the document said.
In late April the FBI raided the Homer, Alaska, business owned by Paul and Marilyn Huepner, who were in the Washington for then-President Donald Trump's rally that preceded the breach at the Capitol but said they didn't take part in that. Marilyn Huepner told reporters it was a case of mistaken identity.
Photos of the two women showed they had similar hairstyles and wore a similar black coat that day.
Huepner said when an FBI agent arrived at the boutique resort, they said they were looking for Nancy Pelosi's laptop. "That still doesn't explain why you're in my home. Or in Homer, Alaska," Huepner told agents, she later recalled to the Associated Press.
In the FBI statement filed in the case of the New York residents, it noted that a search warrant was obtained for the Alaska residence "based in part on evidence showing that residents [a married couple] trespassed on the ground of the U.S. Capitol." It also said two people in Homer identified Marilyn Huepner as being the person seen in photos taken inside the Capitol during the riot.
However, the document stated, the FBI now said "there is probable cause" to believe the mother and son are the two people shown in the photographs, plus their alleged admissions to being there and other evidence.
"I'm very glad to know that we all can recognize, and the FBI has basically admitted, that they were in the wrong place when they came to my home and handcuffed me and held me at gunpoint and interrogated me," Marilyn Huepner told Anchorage television station KTUU.
"So that feels very good," Huepner said.
Uncommon Knowledge
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