Tylar Larson of Webster, caught with neo-Nazi posters, arraigned in Boston on weapon charge

Steve Orr
Democrat and Chronicle

An 18-year-old from Webster caught in Boston with posters from a white-supremacist group and a pair of brass knuckles was led down the wrong path by others, his lawyer said Tuesday.

Tylar Larson was arraigned in Boston on Tuesday on a charge of carrying a dangerous weapon — the brass knuckles that a police officer found in his pocket.

"He’s contrite about this. He didn’t intend for something like this to happen," his lawyer, Nitin Dalal, said in a telephone interview. "He met these people online, one of them on, like, Xbox. I wouldn't call these people his friends, more like acquaintances to hang out with. He sort of got led down this path."

Larson was part of a group of seven men reportedly wearing masks and hooded sweatshirts who were confronted by police in the East Boston neighborhood Friday night.

Police had been alerted that a group associated with a well-known white supremacist organization had been papering the neighborhood with posters that residents found offensive, according to a copy of the police incident report obtained by the Democrat and Chronicle.

Some of the posters extolled the organization, Patriot Front, while others labeled immigrants criminals and urged they be reported to police.

When officers walked up to the group of men, Larson was "holding a can of spray adhesive and posters bearing the following phrases: 'Reclaim America,' 'Your speech will be hate speech,' 'To ourselves and our posterity' and 'Patriot Front US,'" the police report said.

Anti-hate groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League use terms such as "white nationalist hate group," "racist" and "neo-Nazi" to describe the Texas-based Patriot Front.

The group was formed in 2017 by people who had been leaders of the deadly white-supremacist rally and riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, that August.

Police arrested two other men Friday, both from Massachusetts. Christopher Hood, 20,  was found with a knife and charged with carrying a dangerous weapon. Matthew Wolf, 26, swatted an officer's hand and was charged with assault.

All three were freed on $500 bail and ordered to return to court March 26.

Four other young men in the group, all age 18 or 19 and from as far away as Mississippi and Maine, were not charged.

Dalal stressed that his client was not charged with posting offensive material but only with possessing the brass knuckles. "I think he had them to have them, rather than have any manifest intent to use them on anybody," Dalal said.

Larson, who has a part-time job in the Rochester area, had met the other young men online and in some cases in person over the last year or so. But Dalal said he had no information that his client was a member of the Patriot Front.

"I didn’t get the impression he was a white supremacist. He’s baby-faced, soft-spoken," the lawyer said. "He didn’t imagine this was a situation they would get themselves into."

SORR@Gannett.com