A day of stunning savagery
Police guarding the Capitol on Jan. 6 expected to face a crowd of angry demonstrators, said and in They weren’t prepared for a violent assault on democracy.
ON THE MORNING of Jan. 6, Caroline Edwards, a 31-yearold United States Capitol Police officer, was stationed by some stairs on the Capitol grounds when the energy of the crowd in front of her seemed to take on a different shape; it was like that moment when rain suddenly becomes hail. A loud, sour-sounding horn bleated, piercing through the noise of the crowd, whose cries coalesced into an accusatory chant: “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” Edwards, who is 5-foot-4, tried to make herself look imposing. Behind a row of bike racks, alongside four other officers, she stood in a wide stance, her hands on her hips. A man in front of her whipped off his jacket as if he were getting ready for something, flipped his red MAGA hat backward—and then the rioters were pushing the bike racks forward as the officers pushed back, trying to hold their balance.
A sergeant standing closer to the Capitol looked over just in time to see a bike rack heaved up and onto Edwards, whom he recognized by her tied-back blond hair. She crumpled to the ground, head hitting concrete, the first officer down in what would prove to be a bloody, bruising battle, the worst assault on the Capitol since 1814, when the British burned the building to the ground. The crowd howled and roared, rushing past the barricade as that sergeant started screaming into the radio orders to lock all Capitol doors.
Edwards’ blue cap had been knocked from her head. Once she got back on her feet, she stood, dazed and leaning on a railing for support, her hair loose and disheveled, as rioters flung themselves past the barriers, her colleagues punching back the few they could. Officers around the building heard, over the radio, an anguished call distinct from any other they had encountered on the job: “Help!”
On the other side of the Capitol, Harry Dunn, a 6-foot-7 former college football player, thought he recognized that voice. It sounded to him like Edwards, an officer he’d trained, someone whom more officers than seemed possible considered a close personal friend, including Dunn. He started running toward the west front.
Inside, near the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, Devan Gowdy was putting on his riot gear when he heard that same call for help— frantic and high-pitched—and then his unit was sprinting through the building, down two flights of stairs, and out a door on the west front of the building. Gowdy, blinking, took in a scene that seemed to have been spliced in from some other, unfamiliar world: A crowd of thousands raged before him. Standing on a small wooden stage built for the inauguration, he felt as if he’d been performing for a murderous, violent audience as people started throwing cans, paintballs, bolts, bottles fizzing with hydrogen peroxide. One rioter he saw was wielding a hatchet with the American flag wrapped around the blade.
Many officers who worked riot control knew, from experience, to take their name tags off before heading into the fray, but Gowdy, a slender 27-year-old with nearly three years on the force, had left his on.
“Hey, Gowdy!
Look at Gowdy!” a rioter screamed. “Gowdy! Gowdy, you’re scared!” another jeered. One of Gowdy’s sergeants, Aquilino Gonell, a 42-year-old veteran of the war in Iraq, who was close by, unable to move from his position lest the crowd burst through, heard the taunts and was chilled to the bone. Gowdy looked at him beseechingly, but what could he do? Gonell saw a rioter pull hard at the shield in Gowdy’s hand, the two of them rocking back and forth. Gonell thought his officer was hit hard in the head with his own shield; Gowdy only knows that a flagpole clattered to his feet just after he felt a blow. Another officer pulled him back to safety inside the building.
Amid the chaos, Gonell lost track of the other members of his unit, a tight-knit crew that usually worked the midnight shift.
Soon he was one of a few officers near the lower west entrance to the building who still had a shield—other officers had either lost theirs in battle or never had one in the first place—and was bracing himself in the doorway, barely holding on. A rioter smashed his hand with a baton. Gonell slipped on a pile of shields wet with toxic spray and feared that the rioters, grabbing his leg, his shield, his arm, would pull him apart before he was somehow able to right himself.
Edwards had gathered herself and spent more than an hour—or was it days, time lost all sense—fighting off rioters or helping other officers on the lower west terrace of the Capitol. She was positioned near a friend from her shift, Brian Sicknick, when they were hit with chemical spray directly in their faces. Edwards’ hands flew to her eyes as she bowed down in pain and stumbled. Sicknick retreated to wash out his eyes, then returned to the fight. Another officer escorted Edwards, her lungs searing from
toxic spray, away from the scene to get medical treatment.
ANTON, A 34-YEAR-OLD Navy veteran in Gonell’s unit, had been ordered, along with the rest of the officers on the west front, to retreat into the Capitol. Inside, a friend grabbed his tactical vest, screaming, “They’re in the building!” They realized that if the rioters came down the interior stairs near the lower west terrace entrance, they would attack, from behind, Gonell and other officers who were fending off the crowd at that door. Anton (who asked to be identified by only his middle name to protect his privacy) ran up two flights, using his shield to shove clusters of rioters back up the stairs.
Arriving two floors up, at the Rotunda, amid paintings of American generals courteously accepting their enemies’ surrender, he joined a melee that was savage, without rules or limits. By then, the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police had arrived in force as allies in the fight, its only audience the presidential statues encircling the room: a beaming Ronald Reagan, a fierce Andrew Jackson, Dwight Eisenhower in a pose of resolve. Anton took none of it in: He was punching, his fists bloody, hitting men, women, equipment, trying to push the crowd back. Even as he fought, his mind was flooding with questions: Was he going to die here?
And if he did, would these demonic faces be the last thing he saw? What would it take for him to actually use his gun? And—what the hell happened to Hoyte?
He had been separated from his friend, Lennox Hoyte, a 32-year-old U.S. Army veteran who served in the military police in Afghanistan. Only later did Anton learn, stricken with guilt, just how badly the day had gone for him. Hoyte was pulled into the crowd, yanked so hard that his gear ripped. Someone beat his hand with a pipe; another rioter swung a piece of scaffolding at him before he was able to tear himself free. He ended up trapped with another officer in an enclosure beneath the inaugural stage, its doors, embedded with electric circuitry, serving as their barricade. Injured, he spent hours there surrounded by a mob that kept trying to break through those doors, unable to leave as chemical spray rained down between the planks of wood overhead.
Another friend, Dominick Tricoche, was off duty but drove to the Capitol after a fellow officer texted the unit’s group chat saying something serious was underway at the Capitol. Fighting, plunging into the crowd to try to help another officer who had been swarmed, he wept chemically induced tears, as if his body’s physical reaction matched the grief and terror he felt in a crowd he was certain wanted to kill him. His eyes felt as if they were merely receptacles for pain; even the air seemed to be on the attack. “Traitor! Traitor!” the rioters chanted, as someone flung a bike rack at him and he fell down a flight of stone stairs. The stone, slick and slippery with blood and tear gas, was punishing: An officer on the west front, a large man with a beard, fell hard on the stairs and was out cold for three minutes. A friend threw himself over that man’s body to protect his gun, his own hand breaking amid the trampling horde.
DUNN, WHEN HE rushed to the west front, found that he could not make his way through the crowd to find Edwards. He tried to help hold the line by the western lawn, positioned high above the crowd, his rifle aimed at a mob throwing smoke bombs and waving Confederate and Thin Blue Line flags. Like nearly every armed officer that day, he held his fire, out of restraint but also fear: How many rioters would fire right back? The police were clearly outnumbered.
Back inside the building, Dunn positioned himself on the floor below the Rotunda, stopping rioters who were trying to get past him to an area where officers were recovering. Once Gonell was able to retreat inside, he was relieved to see Dunn. Gonell’s left shoulder was badly injured, but he was using that arm to try to help transport Rosanne Boyland, a member of the crowd who had lost consciousness and had no pulse. Dunn joined Gonell and others as they carried Boyland upstairs so she could be administered CPR. (She would later be pronounced dead.)
By early evening, with the help of the Metropolitan Police, the Capitol Police had all but cleared the building, and the National Guard had finally arrived. Officers downstairs in the Crypt were on their knees in the hallway, racked with coughs, or standing bereft in a long line for the bathroom, which was crowded with colleagues trying to soothe their searing eyes. When Anton saw Tricoche, he looked as if he had been dipped in a vat of flour, covered in the residue of all that chemical spray.
Anton was taking a break from checking that rooms throughout the Capitol were clear when he heard word over the radio that an officer—he didn’t know who—was receiving CPR. He looked down over a railing and saw, one floor below, some close friends from the midnight shift huddled over a body in uniform. He rushed to direct the EMTs to the right elevator. When he joined his friends, he saw that the person they were helping was Brian Sicknick, Edwards’ shiftmate. He realized that a day that he thought could not possibly get even more horrific just had.
In the Rotunda, Dunn collapsed against a wall beside a fellow officer, openly weeping. In a raw moment that would reverberate beyond that day, he called out in anguish: “Is this America?”
This is an excerpt from “The Capitol Police and the Scars of Jan. 6,” published by The New York Times Magazine on Jan. 4.