Charges reinstated for Irvine, LA men accused of torching police car during George Floyd protest

A federal appeals court in Pasadena reinstated arson charges Thursday against two Southern California men accused of torching a Santa Monica police car during a George Floyd protest in 2020.

Nathan Wilson and Christopher Beasley were charged four years ago in Los Angeles federal court after they attended a protest gathering in Santa Monica on May 31, 2020, where they were allegedly recorded setting a police car on fire and posted the video on social media, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Beasley was identified from the video, but Wilson, who was wearing sunglasses and an American flag bandana over his face, was named months later after he was pictured on a wanted poster, prosecutors said.

Wilson, 32, of Irvine, and Beasley, 36, of Los Angeles allegedly set fire to the police car as the city was filled with demonstrators marching to protest Floyd’s in-custody Memorial Day 2020 death in Minneapolis.

Wide-spread looting occurs in stores off Broadway as police attempt to clear a sit-in protest for the killing of George Floyd on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica on Sunday, May 31, 2020.
(Photo by Axel Koester, Contributing Photographer)

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Two years later, U.S. District Judge Fernando Olguin threw out the indictment against the men, who argued that they were unconstitutionally singled out for prosecution based on the perception that they held anti-government views.

The defendants alleged that public statements from then-President Donald Trump and then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr about how the DOJ intended to aggressively address criminal activity that occurred during the protests had directly resulted in their prosecution.

Olguin agreed with Wilson and Beasley that they were entitled to seek evidence from the government to support their argument that they had been singled out because of their apparent anti-government views. However, prosecutors refused to provide internal information about charging decisions involving the single arson counts.

In fact, according to appellate Judge James Donato, the 2020 charges filed against Wilson and Beasley “were the first stand-alone prosecutions for arson by the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California since 2007.”

In their May appeal before a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena, DOJ attorneys argued that the judge who dismissed the case incorrectly determined there was a discriminatory intent behind the prosecution.

In his concurring opinion, Judge Patrick J. Bumatay wrote that by dismissing the indictments of Wilson and Beasley “the district court far overstepped its boundaries.”

The case was remanded back to Olguin in LA federal court for further proceedings.

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