Victims in 2011 Giffords attack see parallel to Capitol riot
PHOENIX — As a proTrump mob laid siege to the U.S. Capitol this week, former Rep. Gabby Giffords could only wait nervously for news about her husband, Mark Kelly, who was barely a month into his job as a senator from Arizona.
A decade earlier it was Kelly enduring the excruciating wait for news about Giffords, who was shot in the head in an attempted assassination that, like Wednesday’s siege, shocked the nation and prompted a reckoning about the state of politics and discourse in the United States.
For some who survived the attack 10 years ago Friday, the violence inside the U.S. Capitol this week was a painful reminder of that day, when a gunman with paranoid schizophrenia killed six and injured 12, in addition to Giffords, who was meeting with constituents in a grocery store parking lot in Tucson.
“It oftentimes gets forgotten because we are in a heightened and really vitriolic place in politics — every single one of those people, whether they were a staffer, security guard, member, is a human being,” said Daniel Hernandez, the Giffords intern who was credited with saving her life when he put pressure on her bleeding head wound while waiting for paramedics.
The storming of the Capitol “was a stark reminder that at any moment we could go from having a congressional event that we all think is held to a different standard, and yet in five minutes we had people on the (Senate) floor, people in Nancy Pelosi’s office,” said Hernandez, who is now a Democratic state lawmaker representing part of Tucson in the Arizona Legislature.
The county commemorated the 10-year anniversary Friday and dedicated a memorial to those slain and injured.
The shooting of Giffords, her staff and the constituents who arrived to speak to their congresswoman rattled the nation in the aftermath of the bitter and contentious 2010 election, which saw the tea party movement sweep Democrats from office around the country. Giffords had barely retained her seat.
It prompted an extraordinary show of unity. At President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address a little more than two weeks later, Republicans and Democrats sat side by side instead of clustering on opposite sides of the chamber.
It was short-lived. The country is more polarized than ever. Congress was threatened.
Kelly was in the Senate chamber on Wednesday when the mob breached the Capitol, and he was escorted to a safe location, his spokesman, Jacob Peters, said.