Biography
Brian Jacob Church was one of the "NATO 3." Arrested in a Chicago police entrapment operation before the 2012 NATO summit and charged with terrorism, he and his co-defendants were acquitted of the terrorism counts and convicted only of mob action and possessing an incendiary device. He was sentenced to five years and has since completed his sentence.
Brian “Jacob” Church became known nationally as one of the “NATO 3,” activists arrested in Chicago in May 2012 in the days leading up to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit. Prosecutors alleged the group planned attacks using incendiary devices; the defense argued the case was driven by undercover policing and inflammatory rhetoric around dissent.
A jury ultimately acquitted Church and the others of the most serious terrorism-related counts but convicted them on lesser charges tied to arson-related offenses and “mob action.” He was sentenced to five years in prison, with the court and prosecutors noting he had already been jailed for an extended period pending trial—making the case a prominent example in U.S. debates about protest, surveillance, and the boundary between political speech and criminal conspiracy. Brian Church was a 22-year-old Florida-based Occupy organizer at the time of his May 16, 2012 arrest in a Bridgeport, Chicago apartment, four days before the start of the NATO summit. He, Brent Vincent Betterly, and Jared Chase had traveled to Chicago to protest the summit. Two undercover Chicago Police Department officers — Nadia Chikko and Mehmet Uygur, posing as anarchist organizers — had supplied beer-bottle Molotov cocktails and encouraged escalation. The three were charged under Illinois state terrorism statutes — the first such state-terrorism prosecution in Illinois history. A Cook County jury acquitted them of the terrorism charges on February 7, 2014 but convicted them of mob action and possession of incendiary devices to commit arson. He was sentenced on April 25, 2014 to 5 years in Illinois state prison.
