Slain police officer honored at Capitol
WASHINGTON — His children waited for him at the top of the East Capitol steps Tuesday, holding their mother’s hands as the military honor guard carried Billy Evans’s coffin into the Capitol.
All rose in the Rotunda as the doors swung open, and President Joe Biden and members of Congress put their hands on their hearts. The Capitol Police saluted, and the honor guard laid Evans upon a catafalque that once held the coffin of President Abraham Lincoln.
Feet away from Biden, in the front row, Evans’s young son, Logan, wore his father’s police cap while clutching a teddy bear. Evans’s daughter, Abigail, had on a dark dress.
“We are all shocked by the senselessness of this loss,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., at the beginning of the congressional ceremony. “To Billy’s beloved children, Abigail and Logan, I want you to know we are forever indebted to your dad. We will remember his sacrifice, your sacrifice, forever.”
It was the second time in less than three months that mourners gathered in the Capitol Rotunda to honor a fallen police officer. Evans, like Brian Sicknick before
him, was protecting members of Congress and others on Capitol Hill from a violent incursion and died in the line of duty.
Evans, 41, was killed April 2 when he and another Capitol Police officer, standing in front of a steel barricade near the Russell Senate Office Building, were struck by a car whose driver intentionally rammed the barrier, authorities said. The other officer survived, and the driver was fatally shot by police.
Inside the Rotunda on Tuesday morning, several dozen socially distanced mourners sat around the coffin, which was draped in an American flag. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., addressed the group, the president picked up a toy that Abigail, 7, had dropped and handed it back to her.
Then Biden, who also had come to the Rotunda to honor Sicknick, rose before the mourners and spoke words of grief and solace.
“I’m sorry for the second time in two months we have to have such a ceremony,” Biden told the gathering.
To Evans’s mother, Janice, he said: “Mom, I didn’t know Billy, but I knew Billy. I grew up with Billies. . . . Billy was always the kid, if you got in a fight and you were outnumbered 3 to 1, he’d jump in, knowing you’d both get beat. He was the one who always kept his word. If he said he’d be there, he’d be there.”
And of Evans’s fellow officers, he said: “Never . . . has so much strain and responsibility been placed on the shoulders of Capitol Police.” He added, “You watch them do their duty with pure courage and never complain.”
Evans is officially listed as the sixth Capitol officer to die in the line of duty. Another was Sicknick, 42, who died Jan. 7, a day after he and scores of fellow officers were injured by a riotous mob that besieged the Capitol in support of President Donald Trump’s false election-fraud claims. Sicknick’s cremated remains rested in honor in the Rotunda on the night of Feb. 2 as Biden and others paid their respects.
A viewing period for Capitol Police officers began at noon, with members of Congress also allowed to attend. A half-hour after the viewing ends, Evans’s remains will be removed from the Rotunda in a 6:30 p.m. departure ceremony, officials said.
“In giving his life to protect our Capitol and our Country, Officer Evans became a martyr for our democracy,” Schumer and Pelosi said in a statement announcing the honor. “It is our hope that this tribute will be a comfort” to his family.
Evans, a native of North Adams, Mass., who joined the force 18 years ago, is to be buried Thursday after a private funeral in Adams, Mass.
“Billy was the best father, son, brother, and friend anyone could ever hope for,” his family said in a statement. “His death has left a gaping void in our lives that will never be filled.” As for Logan and Abigail, “their dad was a hero long before the tragic events” on Capitol Hill.
The driver of the car that hit him, Noah Green, 25, was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer after he got out of the vehicle with a knife, authorities said. A relative said Green, who lived in Virginia, had shown symptoms of mental illness.
On his Facebook page, Green listed himself as a “Follower of Farrakhan” – an apparent reference to Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Black nationalist group Nation of Islam. His last post links to a Nation of Islam video that Green said was a “divine warning to us all during these last days of our world as we know it.”
In Sicknick’s case, federal authorities have arrested two men for allegedly assaulting him with a deadly weapon, a toxic chemical spray, during the Jan. 6 riot. The cause of Sicknick’s death the following day remains undetermined.
The suspects, Julian Khater, 32, of State College, Pa., and George Tanios, 39, of Morgantown, W.Va., have been charged with nine offenses involving assaults on three officers.
Before this year, the only members of the Capitol force to be killed by an attacker were Officer Jacob Chestnut and Detective John Gibson, who were shot July 24, 1998, by a former mental patient who entered the Capitol with a gun.
The two others listed as having died in the line of duty are Sgt. Christopher Eney, who was accidentally shot by a fellow officer during a training exercise in 1984, and Sgt. Clinton Holtz, who died of a heart attack in 2014 after what authorities said was stressful duty in command of other officers at a crime scene.