Raleigh man who tried to light police car on fire during protest will go to prison
A 22-year-old Raleigh man will spend 30 months in federal prison for trying to light a police car on fire after George Floyd protests last year in the city.
Mikwan Domell Garfield pleaded guilty Monday to one count of conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States, a charge related to the 2020 fire at the Raleigh police southeast substation.
Just after midnight on May 31, a Raleigh police captain found and extinguished the blaze coming from the fuel tank of a parked vehicle, U.S. Attorney G. Norman Acker III said in a news release.
Investigators found a charred sock in the fuel filler, another sock near the car and a bottle that smelled of gasoline. The fire caused $5,000 in damage to the car.
Co-defendant already sentenced
A few days later, investigators traced a fingerprint from the bottle to Garfield’s co-defendant Jabari Davis, who was sentenced to 30 months in March.
Davis told U.S. District Court Judge James C. Dever III that he began the night joining thousands in the Black Lives Matter movement as they marched through the Raleigh streets calling for reform. He later stuffed the sock in the fuel tank of a police SUV on Rock Quarry Road, lit it and tossed a Molotov cocktail toward a row of more police cars, his 2020 indictment said.
“I got caught up in all the chaos that happened, things that I witnessed,” he said in March. “I forgot the main reason that I went downtown in the first place: to peacefully protest.”
A pair of protests on Memorial Day weekend saw frustration over police violence bring thousands to Raleigh for what began as peaceful demonstration. But as night fell, police in riot gear used tear gas and clashed with rioters smashing downtown windows and lighting fires.
More than a dozen were arrested and damage to downtown property rose into the millions of dollars. Protesters returned nearly every day for weeks with no arrests, many of them painting murals over the plywood-covered windows.