Philly Proud Boy gets nearly two months behind bars for his role in Jan. 6 Capitol riot

When a son was born in the mid-1980s to Kevin Vy, a Vietnamese migrant fleeing communism in an Indonesian refugee camp, he and the child’s mother settled on an aspirational name.

“We [were] looking for Freedom,” he would say nearly four decades later. “That’s why I give him that name.”

That child, now grown, would go on to join the militant right-wing Proud Boys, to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and, on Tuesday, to become the third member of the organization’s Philadelphia chapter to be sentenced for his role in the attack.

But as a federal judge in Washington ordered Freedom Vy, 39, to spend nearly two months behind bars, his lawyer maintained that Vy deeply regretted involving himself in an assault on what prosecutors described as the values that once inspired his name.

“Mr. Vy has enormous pride in being an American, and the freedoms he is afforded in this country,” defense lawyer Alfred Guillaume III said in court filings. “[He] has expressed great regret in his affiliation with the Proud Boys, and his actions on Jan. 6, 2021.”

Vy’s punishment — which includes a 50-day term of incarceration, one year of probation, and an order to pay $500 restitution — comes nearly four years after the mob of angry supporters of former President Donald Trump ransacked the Capitol building, causing nearly $3 million in damage, leaving scores of officers injured, and disrupting the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

Since then, federal prosecutors have charged nearly 1,500 people nationwide with participating. But they have repeatedly highlighted the role Proud Boys members from Pennsylvania played in fomenting the attack.

» READ MORE: Pennsylvania Proud Boys played a big role in Jan. 6 planning: Key takeaways from Capitol riot sedition trial

Zach Rehl, the former head of the organization’s Philadelphia chapter, is serving a 15-year sentence on sedition charges at a federal prison in Petersburg, Va. A jury found him and three other top Proud Boys leaders from other parts of the country guilty last year of planning the violence that unfolded that day.

Two others who traveled to Washington with Rehl and Vy — Brian Healion, 34, of Drexel Hill, and Isaiah Giddings, 31, of Philadelphia — have pleaded guilty. Healion was sentenced to 100 days behind bars in July. Giddings awaits sentencing in January.

And at least two other members — Aaron Whallon Wolkind, the former vice president of the Proud Boys Philadelphia chapter, and John Charles Stewart, a member from Carlisle, have been implicated in prosecutors’ account of the Proud Boys’ actions that day, though neither of them appears to have been charged.

For his part, Vy — who pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of entering a restricted area in June — said he didn’t go to Washington intent on causing trouble. He maintained he had hoped to protect other Trump supporters from becoming targets of attacks.

“The whole summer [before], I saw people being harassed because their skin was white, [saw] Asian people getting harassed and assaulted because they were Asian,” he said in court filings in the run-up to his sentencing Tuesday. “I know with these rallies … it can get a little rowdy and stuff, and everything going through my head was just to keep people safe.”

Prosecutors insisted the evidence proved otherwise.

Adopting the handle “Freedom Reigns,” Vy joined Proud Boys from across the country in encrypted group chats in the days leading up to Jan. 6. They discussed plans for the group’s presence in Washington as Trump’s supporters descended on the city at the former president’s urging.

“Gonna be war soon,” one member of the chat posted three days before the attack, prompting another to respond: “Time to stack those bodies in front of Capitol Hill.”

Others in the group chat wondered: “Are the normies” — an apparent reference to Trump supporters who were not Proud Boys members — “and ‘other’ attendees going to push through police lines and storm the Capitol building.”

Vy would later dismiss those words as nothing more than “bar talk” and “bull—.”

“They’re talking reckless,” he said in an interview quoted in court filings. “They’re showing bravado and machoism to the other brothers.”

Still, Vy, Rehl, Giddings, and Healion set out from Philadelphia on Jan. 5, trading emergency contact info and blood types before their trip — as if, prosecutors said, they were expecting some sort of violence that day.

And on the morning of Jan. 6, Vy and others joined a crowd of nearly 100 Proud Boys and sympathizers that marched from the Washington Monument toward the Capitol building.

The Philadelphia Proud Boys were among the first crowd of rioters to burst through the security perimeter after another area man, Ryan Samsel, 40, of Bristol, helped topple police barricades — an act prosecutors describe as the riot’s inciting incident.

» READ MORE: The Bucks County man behind the moment that kicked off the Jan. 6 Capitol riot convicted at trial

They paused to snap selfies of themselves making the “OK” hand gesture adopted by the Proud Boys and other white-power groups as they fought their way up to the upper west terrace.

All around them, rioters were assaulting police, and as officers struggled to reestablish a security perimeter, Vy broke off from his fellow Proud Boys to taunt them.

“We used to back you guys,” he shouted, in a scene caught on video. “I know you signed up for a noble job. You meant well when you signed up. … But you guys chose your side.”

But as word spread that Vice President Mike Pence had been evacuated from the Capitol building and Rehl suggested the group make their way inside to see history unfold, Vy expressed reservations.

“I think it’s a horrible idea,” he said in a conversation caught on cell-phone video. “But I’m not letting you go in alone.”

All told, the Philadelphia Proud Boys spent roughly 20 minutes inside the Capitol building — entering through a broken door, carousing with other rioters in the office of U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkely (D., Ore.), and eventually making their way back outside by crawling through a broken window.

They headed back to Philadelphia the next day, but not before — Rehl told jurors at his 2023 trial — stopping to buy cases of beer to drink on their way home.

“Vy, Rehl, Healion and Giddings had already seen violence — and participated in it themselves,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kyle M. McWaters said in filings in advance of Tuesday’s hearing. “And yet, they celebrated. Their actions show a disrespect for the rule of law and American institutions.”

Since Vy’s 2021 arrest, he has continued to work as a contractor and renounced any affiliation with the Proud Boys, Guillaume, his lawyer, said. He told U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly on Tuesday he doubted his client would ever find himself in legal trouble of this magnitude again.

“Mr. Vy is not a violent offender, nor does he have any inclination to commit similar crimes in the future,” Guillaume wrote in court papers. “[He’s] an individual who made a poor decision in the midst of a good one” — exercising his right to participate in political protest, one of the very freedoms after which he’d been named.