Five members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front settled a civil lawsuit over defacing the Arthur Ashe mural in Richmond’s Battery Park in October 2021.

Details of the settlement are confidential, according to the national civil rights organization that filed the lawsuit for two anonymous neighborhood residents. Their attorneys declined to comment on the deal.

The residents alleged Patriot Front targeted the Ashe mural because of its location in a historically Black neighborhood and conspiring to violate their civil rights under a law known as the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which ensures protections against intimidation and violence.

The residents also claimed that defacing the mural was intended to intimidate them and keep them from frequenting the public park, keep their children away from the public space and led them to lose sleep.

The lawsuit sought damages, for the court to rule that the vandalism violated their rights and to stop Patriot Front members from future violations.

Attorneys for the defendants — Nathan Noyce, Thomas Dail, Paul Gancarz, Daniel Turetchi and Aedan Tredinnick — did not respond to interview requests.

Noyce was arrested and charged in April with a range of federal crimes in connection to his alleged participation in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection.

He pleaded not guilty to all charges. In April court filings for the vandalism case, Noyce and Dail admitted to defacing the mural but denied it was part of a coordinated vandalism campaign aimed at murals “honoring Black lives,” as the plaintiffs claimed.

Gancarz also acknowledged he was Patriot Front’s regional network director for Virginia, Washington, D.C., Maryland and Delaware at the time of the vandalism.

He described it as a “regrettable incident involving the Arthur Ashe mural” that only three people — Noyce, Dail and another Patriot Front member known as “Christopher VA” — knew about.

The Ashe mural vandalism prompted Thomas Rousseau, Patriot Front’s national director, to require “leadership approval of any actions involving murals,” according to a court filing in the case from Gancarz.

Despite confessions in the vandalism case, no criminal charges have been filed.

Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney Colette McEachin wasn’t aware Patriot Front members admitted culpability in the incident, but didn’t rule out future charges.

“[I]f an investigative report is produced by the state police or the Richmond Police Department or some other law enforcement entity that does investigations, then we’ll review it,” McEachin told VPM News. “We’ll see if there is enough evidence to ultimately prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt.”

In April, after videos of the vandalism were uploaded to YouTube, Richmond Police said detectives consulted with McEachin’s office and determined there wasn’t enough evidence to bring charges.

The videos show two masked people spray painting over the colorful mural of Ashe, tagging it with Patriot Front insignias.

When contacted last week about the case, a Richmond Police spokesperson requested VPM News share “court info or anything else you have to help facilitate this request.”

After the civil case’s filings were shared, another Richmond Police spokesperson wrote in an email that they’d “alerted Fourth Precinct detectives” and said “they are researching it.”

A spokesperson for Attorney General Jason Miyares directed VPM News to McEachin’s office when asked if the incident could be considered a hate crime under a provision in state code that includes incidents other than physical assault meant to “intimidate or harass any individual or group because of race, religion, gender, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, or ethnic or national origin.”

“Hate crimes are under the jurisdiction of the local [commonwealth’s attorney],” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “As far as a hate crime goes, it only applies to assaults on people not destruction/vandalism of property.”

McEachin didn’t respond to a follow-up email on whether the vandalism could be considered a hate crime.

The mural of Ashe, a Black tennis icon and Richmond native, was eventually restored by Sir James Thornhill, one of the local artists who originally conceived of and completed the mural.

While the civil case was settled between the residents and five Patriot Front members, it remains active against Patriot Front, Rousseau, unnamed members and others.

The members who settled denied the lawsuit’s claim that Patriot Front is a white supremacist group that seeks a white ethnostate. Noyce and Dail admitted that the person recording the video,

“Christopher VA,” who is named as “Defendant John Doe 1” in the lawsuit, said a racist slur after they began painting over Ashe’s face.

Amy Cooter is the director of research at Middlebury College’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism. She called the vandalism “a form of psychological terrorism.”

Cooter said Patriot Front members commonly share grievances online, but only recently moved into acts of public intimidation.

“Patriot Front hasn’t engaged in some of the street brawls that we would expect from the Proud Boys or other kinds of direct violence,” she said. “I think that the effect, regardless of the intent … is in fact to scare people, to discourage them from public and civic participation more broadly, to effectively kind of clamp down on their ability to have a say in society.”

Patriot Front has some overlap with militia groups and shares ideology with overtly neo-Nazi groups, Cooter said. But she considers it a “nostalgic group” with a top-down national hierarchy and localized chapters.

Those individual chapters tend to stay in touch with each other, Cooter said, but mostly coordinate locally. While the national chapter might set the tone, local groups could decide to act autonomously.

“We have seen, we think, a general increase in groups like this since Trump’s first campaign,” Cooter said. “We’ve also seen some of the groups just being louder about ideas that they or other people have had for a long time.”

The researcher pointed to an array of potential causes for this, including the COVID-19 pandemic, and perceptions of lockdowns and the economy.

“It’s really hard to overstate Trump’s role in legitimizing some of this, in part by leaning into those other grievance narratives,” Cooter said.

Symbols of Patriot Front — which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “a white nationalist hate group” — have been found around Virginia, including outside a Henrico County library in November and other states.