Police officer recounts horrors of the January 6 assault on Capitol

Brut America

"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 ...

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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.

03:35For more UN videos visit www.un.org

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