When Ronald Colton McAbee walked out the front door of a federal prison in Rochester, Minn., on Monday night, he saw two silhouetted figures walking toward him.
It was dark. The Minnesota winter had an icy grip on the prison grounds.
“Is that them?” asked Chad Orum, executive assistant of the prison. McAbee peered again. “I think so,” he said.
Then out of the darkness boomed a woman’s voice: “FREEDOM!”
“‘Yeah, that’s them,’” McAbee said.
Sarah McAbee and her mother, Kim, came forward in the bitter minus-18-degree weather to rescue Colt McAbee after he spent 1,252 days in government custody, brought on by a criminal prosecution that was marred by bald-faced lies. After a handshake with Orum, McAbee was off to live his life again.
‘Let’s get out of here. Yeah, let’s go!’
“I cried,” Colt McAbee told Blaze News during his trip home from Minnesota to Tennessee. “I teared up a little bit and my beard got frozen. It was negative 18 up there, but, I mean, it was great. Best sight of my life.”
When McAbee was let out the front door of FMC Rochester federal prison, it capped a roller-coaster day as everyone watched to see if President Donald J. Trump would issue pardons for Jan. 6 defendants. He was among nearly 250 Jan. 6 men and women released from federal prisons after Trump issued pardon orders.
It was minus-18 degrees when Ronald Colton McAbee walked out of FMC Rochester prison in Minnesota on a Jan. 6 pardon from President Donald J. Trump.Photos courtesy of Sarah McAbee
McAbee got a heads-up from a prison official. “Well, I was sitting in visitation, and a guy came in and said, ‘Hey, it leaked: blanket pardons for everybody.’ I’m like, ‘Okay. Trump still hasn’t said anything.’”
Sarah McAbee visited her husband in prison earlier in the day. After she left, he sat glued to the television in the visitation area.
“I skipped dinner,” he said. “I was not leaving my seat. I was watching everything, making sure he said it.”
Early in his address at the Capital One Center on Jan. 20, President Trump announced that he was going back to the White House to sign “a lot of pardons” for J6ers.
“Next thing I know, I’m being called to the office, getting told to pack up,” McAbee said.
“I waited and I waited, and then they said there’s no order for me,” McAbee said. “They brought me back to the unit, and so I’m pacing around, back and forth.
“I’d never unpacked, and finally around 10 or 11, I said, ‘I’m going to bed. They’ll come get me,’” McAbee said. “Hopefully I’m one of these 1,500 [pardons]. As soon as I laid down and pulled the covers over me, the lights turned on, door opened. ‘Let’s go.’”
‘I was nervous that I’d get taken back in.’
“I’m like, ‘Let’s get out of here. Yeah, let’s go,’” McAbee said. “Oh, man. It was amazing.”
For Sarah, the night was especially bright. She had been on a crusade to bring attention to the dishonest case against her husband for more than three years.
“It was just a wave of emotions, honestly,” Sarah McAbee told Blaze News. “It was relief. It was happiness. It was an emotional roller coaster. But I didn’t believe it until I saw him walking out of those front doors, because we have been lied to for so many years.”
On an August day in 2021, McAbee was arrested by the FBI on charges that he assaulted and obstructed police during civil disorder at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. A federal magistrate judge in Tennessee ruled that McAbee could be free pending trial, but the DOJ obtained an emergency stay from a friendly U.S. district judge in Washington. McAbee has not tasted freedom since.
Colt McAbee celebrates his return to Tennessee after a flight from Minneapolis after he was issued a Jan. 6 pardon by President Donald J. Trump.Photo courtesy of Sarah McAbee
As detailed in a
Blaze News investigation, federal prosecutors lied, twisted evidence, and withheld material from a judge in order to keep McAbee behind bars. A careful review of video evidence shows that McAbee never assaulted Metropolitan Police Department Officer Andrew Wayte as alleged. He shielded him and helped him get back to the police line.
A jury found McAbee guilty on five criminal counts in October 2023. He had earlier pleaded guilty to slapping one police officer after he cross-checked McAbee’s broken shoulder with a riot stick. He received a 70-month prison sentence on Feb. 29, 2024.
“Sitting through the trial, listening to them lie and try to destroy a good man’s life while not being allowed to say anything, was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life,” Sarah McAbee told Blaze News in September 2024. “There were times where my hands were squeezed so hard together, they were red and sweating.”
On McAbee’s first night of freedom, sleep was fleeting and restless.
“I was nervous that I’d get taken back in. I couldn’t believe it,” Colt McAbee said. “I even woke up in the middle of the night thinking I was waking up next to my old cell. I didn’t want to sleep at all.”
The protector role McAbee played on Jan. 6, trying to save the life of Rosanne Boyland, 34, of Kennesaw, Ga., is one he was thrust into as a child growing up in an abusive and dysfunctional family. He became surrogate mother and father to his younger siblings, protecting them from abuse and neglect.
Colt and Sarah McAbee’s bottle of Trump champagne in November 2022 (left) and poured in celebration on Jan. 21, 2025. Above: Winnie the Pooh wisdom above a door in the McAbee home.Joseph M. Hanneman, Sarah McAbee
“Since I was a child, I had to protect myself and brothers from a physically, emotionally, and psychologically abusive father,” McAbee told Judge Rudolph Contreras at his sentencing hearing. “During this time, I had only myself to rely on because my mother left for the same reasons. She left us behind, so I had to step up and make it my mission to protect my brothers.
“When my father snatched my younger brother off the couch by his hair, I jumped in to protect him,” McAbee said. “When he would call me things no parent should call a child, put me against the wall, or hit me, I was just glad it was me and not my brothers. I was often the outlet for his anger.”
McAbee took his fear of being at home and used it to fuel himself to excel in school, sports, and service activities.
“Playing football, soccer, and cheerleading came naturally to me, and I excelled at them because I played a protective role,” McAbee said. “Protect the quarterback, protect the goal, protect the girls. I took pride in my positions and was hard on myself when I failed.”
While he was incarcerated, his mother contacted him and tried to explain her decision to abandon him, Sarah McAbee said. Colt’s mother, Mary, told him, “I chose myself.”
Colt McAbee told Judge Contreras that Sarah has kept him grounded all this time:
Ronald Colton McAbee was nearly struck by a stereo speaker hurled by rioters outside the Lower West Terrace Tunnel at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Metropolitan Police Department bodycam video/Graphic by Blaze News
“Sarah taught me to trust in myself. She’s my rock,” he said. “I’ve gone through so many things alongside her, and she keeps me grounded. She has never faltered, never ran from a challenge, and always pushes through. She has showed me what true loyalty and determination is.”
Sarah McAbee founded the Stand in the Gap Foundation, which recently gave a $40,000 grant to help build Jan. 6 Road Home, a new Texas residential complex that will house some J6ers to aid them in re-entering society after prison.
Both of the McAbees expressed a desire to help enact reforms to prevent any further weaponization of the FBI and DOJ as a way to punish supporters of President Trump.
“I believe that it’s going to be history in the making in a way that America has never seen before,” Sarah McAbee said.
The McAbees returned to their Tennessee home on Jan. 21. They planned to pop the cork on a bottle of Trump champagne that Sarah kept in a windowsill during the years Colt was missing from Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas, and other holidays.
As he boarded a flight home to Tennessee, Colt McAbee was asked what Jan. 20 meant to him. He didn’t hesitate: “It was the best day of my life other than my wedding.”
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