After a volunteer canvassing for Sen. Marco Rubio was assaulted Sunday night, the Florida Republican came out swinging on social media.
“Last night one of our canvassers wearing my T-shirt and a Desantis hat was brutally attacked by 4 animals who told him Republicans weren’t allowed in their neighborhood in #Hialeah #Florida,” Rubio tweeted on Monday. “He suffered internal bleeding, a broken jaw & will need facial reconstructive surgery[.]”
However, an incident report filed by the arresting officer and provided to The Daily Beast by the Hialeah Police Department makes no mention of a political motive, anyone saying anything about Republicans, or the other three people Rubio claimed were involved.
ADVERTISEMENT
Javier Jesus Lopez, a 22-year-old warehouse worker who lives down the street from where the altercation took place, now faces a felony charge of aggravated battery. A phone number listed for Lopez in the incident report—which The Daily Beast has redacted from the document—went straight to voicemail Monday evening.
In an email on Monday, Sgt. Jose Torres of the Hialeah PD told The Daily Beast that the case is “open and active,” and that investigators “soon” expect to determine a motive. When Local 10 News asked Torres if the violence was political, he also said the investigation was ongoing, but as of Monday afternoon there was “no indication that is the case.”
Rubio, who was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010, is running for reelection against Democratic challenger Rep. Val Demings. The former police chief of Orlando, Demings is trailing Rubio by just under five points as of Monday night, according to the latest FiveThirtyEight poll.
The alleged attack on the Rubio volunteer occurred around 6:30 p.m. Sunday in a residential section of Hialeah, a city in Miami-Dade County of just under 225,000 residents. When police responded, the Rubio volunteer told officers that he had been “walking around the neighborhood handing out fliers when he came across [Lopez] who was blocking the sidewalk,” the incident report states.
“[Lopez] confronted the vic and stated that he could not pass through the sidewalk in front of his residence,” it continues. “Vic proceeded to walk towards the street to avoid the defendant at which point the defendant stated to the vic, ‘You can’t pass by here this is my neighborhood.’ Vic then stated to the defendant, ‘This is public property and I can be here if I want to.’”
At this point, Lopez and the volunteer “began to have a verbal dispute,” after which Lopez allegedly grabbed the man and “proceeded to slam him against the floor.”
That’s when a third man stepped in and kicked Lopez, the alleged attacker, in the face, but fled before police arrived, according to the incident report. Lopez then punched the Rubio volunteer “multiple times with closed fists… causing him to have a severe swelling on the right side of his face and his right eye being completely shut… [Lopez] continued striking the [volunteer] on his mouth causing a severe swelling and bleeding.”
Hialeah Fire Rescue Engine 2 responded to the scene to treat the Rubio volunteer’s injuries, concludes the report, which does not mention the volunteer being transported to the hospital. Lopez was taken into custody and “transported to TGK,” according to the report, using the acronym for Miami’s Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center.
The Rubio volunteer is not named in the incident report, but was later identified by Hialeah Mayor Esteban Bovo to CBS News as Christopher Monzon.
The Daily Beast was unable to reach Monzon, a reputed neo-Nazi who is well-known to anti-fascist activists who posted details of Monzon’s’ far-right bona fides online following Rubio’s tweet.
Monzon was spotted at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white nationalists held a torchlight procession before one of them killed a counterprotester the next day. He was once a member of the League of the South (LOS), which has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, but claimed last year to have resigned.
“While it is unclear how a Cuban American came to identify as a white supremacist and ‘southern nationalist,’ it seems apparent that Monzon received some encouragement from his parents, who have participated in League of the South demonstrations, decked out in Confederate battle flags (CBFs) and toting LOS signs,” the SPLC wrote of Monzon in 2017.
That same year, Monzon was arrested for attempting to assault protesters in Hollywood, Florida with a Confederate flag. He was the lone counterprotester at a gathering organized to push for streets named after Confederate generals to be renamed.
“The current events, like the violence instigated by these communist individuals who seek to silence us through means of violence and coercion, they have kept them away from here, but they will not intimidate me,” Monzon told Local 10 news shortly before he was hauled away by cops.
In 2021, Monzon ran for Hialeah City Council, receiving a paltry 3.7 percent of the vote in the primary.
Journalists from the Miami New Times attempted to interview Monzon on Monday in his room at HCA Florida Kendall Hospital, with permission from the facility’s communications department, but said they were blocked from entering by members of the Vice City Proud Boys, the militant right-wing group’s Miami-Dade chapter.
Rubio press secretary Ansley Bradwell did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.
