One year after a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn America’s presidential election, a process server was dispatched to a Tipton Lakes residence on the west side of Columbus to find a local man who had participated in the attack, reports The Republic.
The process server was tasked with hand-delivering notice to heavy metal guitarist and local resident Jon Schaffer that the District of Columbia was suing him in federal court related to his actions during the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Most of the time, notifying a defendant that legal action is being taken against them is a simple process. But in this case, as the District of Columbia was about to find out, it would prove to be quite difficult.
The events that unfolded in Tipton Lakes this past January were just the beginning of a months-long quest to find Schaffer, who is a former heavy metal musician in the band Iced Earth, and is known to local residents to be living at times in Columbus, Edinburgh and Brown County.
The search, which has involved a “variety of tools and teams of skip tracers, process servers, private investigators and outside counsel,” has led to “at least 25 separate attempts to serve Schaffer at seven different addresses across three different states” — including three residences in the Columbus area.
While nearly 40 other defendants named in the lawsuit had been served as of mid-August, Schaffer was one of just two defendants who had managed to evade process servers and private investigators who had been on his trail for months.
And as the search intensified earlier this year, the District of Columbia approached federal law enforcement officials involved in an ongoing criminal case against Schaffer for “any information the Department of Justice is willing to share as to Schaffer’s present location” but, as of June 30, had not received any indication that the U.S. Attorney’s Office would help.
On May 18, attorneys representing Schaffer in the criminal case filed a joint status report in which they attested that he remained “under the supervision of the District of Columbia Pre-Trial Services Department” and had been “compliant with pre-trial release conditions.”
According to terms of Schaffer’s release, he is required to “notify (the) U.S. Pretrial/Probation Office of any travel outside the State of Indiana.”
Currently, it is unclear if federal law enforcement officials know Schaffer’s whereabouts, if they believe he has violated the terms of his plea agreement or if they plan to provide any information to the District of Columbia in its effort to serve him in the civil lawsuit. The next joint status report in the criminal case is due by Oct. 28.
Read the full report at The Republic.
