Sandra “Sandy” Lee Hodges appears in photographs, circled in yellow by the Department of Justice, accompanying a statement of facts from the FBI after she was charged in Washington, D.C. on four counts related to her activity inside of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021./Bottom: An Instagram photo tracked down by the FBI shows her “standing amid the chaos” bottom right red Trump hat, blue jacket and white sweater according to court records.
A woman who allegedly roamed the Capitol on Jan. 6 for 40 minutes, was caught on video by a Proud Boy livestreamer and then spotted on Capitol surveillance footage making her way into multiple rooms — including hideaway offices of U.S. senators — all while clutching a Coca-Cola before she left to disrupt police overwhelmed outside, has been arrested.
But Sandra “Sandy” Lee Hodges wanted the FBI to know during her interview with them last April, she was “swallowed by the crowd” and “sucked into the building,” an FBI statement of facts reviewed on Thursday by Law&Crime shows.
Hodges faces four criminal charges including entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building; disorderly conduct in a Capitol building; and parading, picketing or demonstrating in a Capitol building. An arrest warrant was issued on Jan. 26 in Hertford, North Carolina, and she was arrested Thursday.
All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
For the North Carolina woman, it was a series of errors that helped investigators identify her.
Prosecutors say her key card from the high-end Mandarin Oriental Hotel was found by a U.S. Capitol Police officer three days after the attack on the Capitol on the West Plaza near the media tower. After it was linked to Hodges, the FBI was notified.
Hodges told the FBI during an interview at her home in April 2023 that she headed to Washington, D.C., from North Carolina on Jan. 5 after meeting a friend she had met online “a few days prior” who lived in Virginia Beach. They checked into a hotel that she said she paid for and told investigators that they had planned to attend Donald Trump’s speech.
She fell asleep and woke up late though, she said, and when she left the hotel to seek out the president, she told the FBI she “encountered a large group of people who told her the speech was over and everyone was headed to the U.S. Capitol building to protest.”
This was when, she said, she was “sucked into the building.”
She claimed she was only inside briefly and had merely “watched someone rip something off a wall,” before she “realized that something was not right at that point and decided to leave,” the statement of facts notes.
The FBI said their agents showed Hodges pictures from Jan. 6 and she identified herself, including in one of her taken inside the rooms prosecutors say she admitted to entering into over the course of her interview.
Sandra “Sandy” Lee Hodges inside the Capitol.
Surveillance footage from the Capitol shows Hodges trawling the grounds and being “close to a line of barricades defended by officers of the Metropolitan Police Department,” the FBI said. Chemical irritants were going off as police and rioters clashed and she was in the area yelling out “Freedom!” toward the officers, prosecutors say.
Sandra Sandy Lee Hodges appears at the Capitol bottom left.
As she moved with the mob, prosecutors allege that “from her vantage point, Hodges was in position to see violence between rioters and law enforcement.”
Specifically, she was in position to see rioters wrestling over barricades and police deploying crowd control methods against aggressive rioters. She is also accused of remaining in the West Plaza even as police lines collapsed. As officers worked at restoring order, she moved up to the Upper West Terrace and then she was seen on surveillance footage walking to the Senate side of the building near the Senate Wing door.
Notably, while she was inside, the FBI said Hodges turned up in a video recorded by Proud Boy and far-right livestreamer Anthime Gionet, also known as “Baked Alaska.”
While Hodges was inside a U.S. senator’s hideaway office, footage from Gionet allegedly depicts her sitting on a sofa while Gionet “picked up a phone and stated performatively, ‘Hello, U.S. Senate, we have a fraudulent election I would like to report. Yeah we need to get our boy Donald J. Trump in office.””
They then called for then-vice President Mike Pence to get on the line; the only person Trump had falsely told them during his speech could change the outcome of the election certification.
More video showed Hodges banging on tables briefly as the crowd chanted and then as it made it out to a window. Gionet, the FBI said, was heard telling people to break anything and Hodges replied: “I’m not going to break anything. This is our house.”
Hodges also entered the Crypt, according to surveillance footage and was seen chanting “Whose House? Our House!” as she clutched a Coca-Cola. By 3:32 p.m. and as police were still trying to regain control of the entire building, footage shows Hodges heading toward an exit as officers direct the crowd out. In total, the FBI says she spent approximately 40 minutes inside the building but she didn’t go immediately, heading to restricted grounds on the Capitol steps where she appeared to be yelling in the crowd further.
It is unclear if Hodges has retained an attorney and no plea has yet been entered on the docket in the District of Columbia.
