"What I saw was a war scene."
U.S. Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards recalled the moment the Capitol was breached on January 6 while testifying at a public hearing ...
U.S. Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards recalled the moment the Capitol was breached on January 6 while testifying at a public hearing ...
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00:00It was carnage, it was chaos, never in my wildest dreams did I think that as a police
00:17officer, as a law enforcement officer, I would find myself in the middle of a battle.
00:30We started holding on, grabbing the bike racks, you know, there weren't many of us so I grabbed
00:39the middle between two different bike racks and, you know, I wasn't under any pretense
00:45that I could hold it for very long but I just wanted to, you know, make sure that we could
00:50get more people down and get our CDU units time to answer the call so we started grappling
00:58over the bike racks.
01:01I felt the bike rack come on top of my head and I was pushed backwards and my foot caught
01:12the stair behind me and I, my chin hit the handrail and then I, at that point I had blacked
01:20out but my, the back of my head clipped the concrete stairs behind me.
01:29And you were knocked unconscious, is that right, Officer Edwards?
01:31Yes ma'am.
01:34But then when you regained consciousness, even with the injuries, you returned to duty,
01:38is that right?
01:39Yes ma'am.
01:40You know, at that time adrenaline kicked in, I ran towards the west front and I tried to
01:47hold the line at the senate steps at the lower west terrace.
01:54More people kept coming at us, it just seemed like, you know, more and more people started,
02:03you know, coming on to the west front, they started overpowering us.
02:08I can just remember my breath catching in my throat because what I saw was just a war
02:21scene.
02:22It was something like I'd seen out of the movies.
02:26I couldn't believe my eyes, there were officers on the ground, you know, they were bleeding,
02:36they were throwing up, they were, you know, they had, I mean I saw friends with blood
02:42all over their faces, I was slipping in people's blood.
02:48You know, I was catching people as they fell, I'm trained to detain, you know, a couple
02:57of subjects and handle, you know, handle a crowd but I'm not combat trained.
03:05And that day it was just hours of hand-to-hand combat, hours of dealing with things that
03:15were way beyond any law enforcement officer has ever trained for.
03:22And I just remember that moment of stepping behind the line and just seeing the absolute
03:30war zone that the west front had become.
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