As the FBI swooped in to arrest a key instigator in the siege on the US Capitol, a picture was beginning to emerge of Zachary Alam that looked little like the pro-Trump insurgent he is alleged to be.
Alam—dubbed “helmet boy” by some media reports—was identified entering the US Capitol on Jan. 6 in a fur-lined trapper hat before borrowing a black helmet from a fellow rioter.
Once inside, he allegedly engaged in physical confrontations with Capitol Police officers before smashing the window to the Speaker’s Lobby while yelling phrases such as “Let’s f***ing go,” and hurling insulting slurs at law-enforcement, according to the FBI’s arrest report.
Alam was on the scene as Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt was shot while attempting to climb through the broken glass, but he appeared to have exited to a stairwell shortly thereafter, according to the report.
Alam had since contacted family members while on the lam from authorities, it said.
According to an unnamed relative who turned Alam in, he had called to say that he was “sorry for what he had done at the U.S. Capitol but he was not going to turn himself into authorities because he did not want to go to jail again,” the report noted.
He was apprehended Saturday in Denver, Pennsylvania, while carrying a Virginia driver’s license. The Department of Justice’s records did not provide a hometown.
While some early reports indicated he was a Pennsylvania resident, many records suggest that a Zachary Jordan Alam was, in fact, a longtime Virginia resident.
Alam appears to have spent his senior year of high school in Centreville, Virginia, in Fairfax County. Many federal government offices are located in the massive county of more than 1 million residents located just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC.
No public records indicated any political activism during his time at the relatively affluent Chantilly High School.
He spent several post-graduate years in Charlottesville, Virginia, living nearby the University of Virginia, although it is not known whether he was a student there.
In 2011, he received a citation for the charge of “Play on Hwy” from Charlottesville Police, and in 2014, he received a misdemeanor citation for driving while intoxicated.
After returning to Fairfax, though, Alam appears to have become more involved in criminal conduct.
He received charges in 2015 for resisting arrest and drunk in public, followed by a March 2016 charge of petit larceny.
On the night of Nov. 2, 2016, less than a week before the presidential election, Alam was arrested for a series of serious charges including grand larceny of more than $200, possession of burglary tools, possession of marijuana and intentional destruction of property less than $1,000.
Headline USA reached out to Fairfax officials for clarification on what the specific nature of the incident may have been.
