Sterling Devion Carter used to be a staffer for Illinois Democrat Brad Schneider. The 25-year-old got canned after he posed as an FBI agent to “control” the deplorably “MAGA crowd” in D.C., soon after the 2020 election. He “escaped from cops on bikes in a fake police car.” Real cops tracked him down using real detective work.
Staffer a legend in his own mind
Carter didn’t get enough kicks from his self-overpaid gig as a staffer on Capitol Hill, so he resorted to impersonating law enforcement and openly carrying a firearm illegally. He got all the gear he needed online.
They caught up to him at his parent’s house in Georgia. His lawyer, Robert Lee Jenkins, Jr., confirms he lost his job. That’s all he’s saying.
Back on November 14, 2020, two actual police officers were “attempting to control post-election MAGA protesters,” when they spotted “a suspicious police car with a man standing close by with a shirt that read ‘Federal Agent.’” Carter thought he had everyone fooled.
To “the untrained eye,” the police car looked like all the rest with “emergency lights, a laptop mount and a divider to contain detainees.” The font on the license plate was wrong. Not only that, the staffer made a really rookie mistake.
The schizo staffer was standing next to his ride wearing “a full police duty belt on to include handcuffs, a pistol, two magazines and a radio with earpiece attachment.” His T-shirt may have said “Federal Agent” but his gear said fraud.
Even from a distance they noticed “Carter placed his extra gun magazines near his gun holster, which would make it hard for law enforcement to reload with their free hand during a gunfight.” They had to go ask to see his credentials.
Fled the scene
When the officers asked to see his badge, the vigilante staffer “claimed he didn’t have them before flipping on his blue emergency lights and driving away.” They chased him on bicycles “with one officer chasing him through several D.C. streets before abandoning the pursuit for ‘officer safety reasons.‘”
D.C. cops were stumped until someone noticed the T-shirt seemed a lot like one made by 13Fifty Apparel. Agent A. Pascual contacted them for a customer list and soon narrowed the possibilities.
They had him pegged as an impostor but were shocked to learn he was also “a credentialed congressional staffer with security clearances.” It took three weeks to track him down. “Secret Service agents broke into Carter’s home on New Year’s Day in 2021, where they found his Glock 19 handgun, extra magazines, ammunition and receipts for his decked-out police cruiser.”
When his lawmaker boss learned of his arrest, he had a quick choice to make and he made it. He quit before he was fired, that way, he could keep his government issued phone. Then, they learned about his other crime.
As a staffer, he was in charge of the payroll. According to an FBI affidavit, “Carter started filling out payroll authorization forms and faking the signature of Schneider’s chief of staff to get them approved in November 2019, when he was only three months into the job.”
He got a bunch of raises real fast. “Carter raised his annual salary from $54,000 to $138,000, which resulted in a $6,000 bonus for the month and kept up the scam for over a year, gifting himself nearly $80,000 extra.“
