Sean Dunn walked out of federal court Thursday relieved he no longer faced the possibility of jail time. Better known as the D.C. “Sandwich Guy,” the 37-year-old was found not guilty by a jury of assaulting a U.S. Border Patrol agent with his now-famous submarine toss.
But Dunn is still wrestling with all the attention from his arrest and trial, and the knowledge that he altered his future with a viral moment of protest.
“The artwork, the memes – I’m glad that I could inspire people,” Dunn told HuffPost in his first interview following his acquittal. “I’m not comfortable with the ‘hero’ narrative. And it’s been… honestly, it’s been uncomfortable for me. All the attention has made me uncomfortable.”
Dunn, an Air Force veteran, is soft-spoken and describes himself as a private person — quite different from the guy who was shouting “fascist” and “shame” at a group of federal agents before bouncing a Subway footlong off the chest of Gregory Lairmore, a Border Patrol division chief. For context, the incident occurred at 11 p.m. on a Sunday in D.C.’s U Street NW nightlife corridor, near an LGBTQ+ club that was hosting a Latin night.
Phone footage of the encounter was already exploding on social media as Dunn was being held at a Metropolitan Police Department station. He was arraigned in Superior Court the following day before being released and returning to his D.C. apartment. Then things started to get surreal.
“I’m not comfortable with the ‘hero’ narrative. … All the attention has made me uncomfortable.”
– Sean Dunn on his sudden celebrity
That Wednesday night, a squadron of federal agents descended on Dunn’s apartment building, looking armed for battle.
“I knew they might be coming,” Dunn recalled. “I had talked with [my lawyer] and she was going to arrange for me to surrender myself. But it was getting late, we hadn’t heard back, and I was worried they might be coming. When I got the knock on my door, I knew it was them.”
Dunn said he told the agents through the closed door that he wanted to call his attorney, but they didn’t let him.
“The door opened and they had rifles drawn, pointed at me, with riot shields,” he said. “They had gotten a key from the building manager, so they didn’t actually break down the door. It was frightening when it was occurring. And of course I didn’t resist.”
Dunn didn’t reach his attorney until the following day.
Then the White House posted a slickly produced promotional video of Dunn’s re-arrest on social media, presumably funded by taxpayer dollars. Dunn and his attorney understood why he was never able to surrender himself.
Pam Bondi, President Donald Trump’s attorney general, issued a gleeful statement saying Dunn was charged with felony assault of a federal agent, which carries up to eight years in prison. She also said he’d been fired from his job as a Justice Department paralegal, calling Dunn “an example of the Deep State we have been up against.”
“It was very uncomfortable to have the attorney general and the [U.S.] attorney making statements about me,” Dunn said. “When you have such powerful people speaking about you personally, it’s very frightening.”
Without a job, Dunn couldn’t afford to pay a high-priced attorney out of pocket. His lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, represents indigent clients assigned to her in federal court; she handled the case without a fee. Julia Gatto and Nicholas Silverman, attorneys at the big law firm Steptoe, provided assistance pro bono. “Thanks goodness,” Dunn said of his legal team.
Because he was fired for cause, Dunn has not been receiving unemployment benefits. Friends launched a GoFundMe (“Help support the Sandwich Guy”) on his behalf.
Dunn’s sandwich toss preceded Trump’s takeover of policing in Washington by a matter of hours. As masked immigration officers began roaming the city and snatching up immigrants, Dunn’s moment of comical defiance gave a lift to progressives who felt as though everything was coming unmoored. It also provided journalists and Dunn supporters with a seemingly endless well of puns.
“The door opened and they had rifles drawn, pointed at me, with riot shields.”
– Sean Dunn on his re-arrest
Seeing the street art boosted Dunn in turn.
“If I could inspire people and give them hope, that’s great,” he said.
Jeanine Pirro, Trump’s U.S. Attorney for D.C., downgraded the charge to a misdemeanor after a grand jury declined to return an indictment on the felony — one of several repudiations D.C. jurors have delivered Pirro during Trump’s D.C. crackdown. But prosecutors kept Dunn’s case in federal court, and the possibility of up to a year in prison still loomed over him.
The seriousness of the situation helped him remain stone-faced through some absurd court proceedings.
Lairmore, a federal agent for 23 years, testified on cross-examination that the sandwich “kind of exploded” upon impact, and that he felt it through his ballistic vest. He couldn’t testify to what kind of sandwich it was, but maintained that he “could smell the onions and mustard,” prompting a snort from an observer in the gallery.
The defense team showed a photo in which the offending sandwich appeared to be largely intact in its Subway wrapper — an apparent contradiction that Shroff highlighted in her closing argument.
She told the jury that the case was ultimately “about a sandwich.”
“A sandwich that, according to agent Lairmore, somehow both exploded on his chest in a spray of onions and mustard, but also landed intact on the ground still in its Subway wrapping,” she said.
After the verdict, Dunn gave a statement to the press, went home to his apartment and called his mother, his aunt and an old supervisor who’d been following the case.
“I’m ready to move on,” he said.
Despite his acquittal, the ordeal has come at a steep personal cost. Dunn hoped to one day retire from the federal government with a good pension. He had accrued three years with the U.S. Forest Service and nearly another three at the Justice Department. His five years in the Air Force included a deployment to Kandahar, Afghanistan, from July 2010 to January 2011.
“It makes my future very uncertain,” Dunn said. “It was feeling a little less certain anyway with so many layoffs of federal employees. But I had a total of more than 10 years of federal service, so I was expecting to someday retire from federal service. And to suddenly have that all taken away, I’m still processing it and navigating. I need to find a job.”
Dunn is not gloating about the verdict. Trump’s Justice Department has been smashing norms by pursuing prosecutions against the president’s critics. On his attorney’s advice, Dunn did not want to discuss the particulars of the sandwich incident or his thinking that night. But he was willing to answer one question that, somehow, was never resolved during the trial.
“It was turkey,” Dunn said of the sandwich.
And yes, it came with onions and mustard.
