Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards detailed the severe injuries she sustained trying to defend the Capitol from insurrectionists when it was attacked last year, telling the House Jan. 6 committee during its June 9 hearing one of the things she remembers most is looking out and seeing “the absolute war zone the west front had become.”
Edwards was attacked by rioters multiple times as she tried to protect the Capitol that day. She was tear gassed and knocked down to the ground, at one point losing consciousness. At another time that day, she held the line against the rioters with Officer Brian Sicknick, who she described as “ghostly pale.” Sicknick collapsed the evening of the attack , suffering two strokes and dying the next day.
“I can’t even describe what I saw. Never in my wildest dreams did I think as a police officer, law enforcement officer, I would find myself in the middle of a battle. I’m trained to detain a couple of subjects and handle a crowd, but I’m not combat trained. And that day, it was just hours of hand-to-hand combat, of dealing with things that were way beyond any law enforcement officer has ever trained for.”
“There were officers on the ground. They were bleeding, they were throwing up. I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood … It was carnage. It was chaos,” she said.
The hearing June 9 was the first of several planned by the Jan. 6 committee in the coming weeks. In the year since its creation, the committee has conducted more than 1,000 interviews, seeking critical information and documents from people witness to, or involved in, the violence that day.
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