Run-up to the riot: 'If something happens, just find work'
At 7 a.m. on January 6, an officer on the department's midnight shift finished work and got into his car near the Capitol. Already, swarms of people were walking past, waving Trump flags. He sat in the driver's seat for a minute, watching. He called up an old colleague and marveled at the crowd.
The officer was surprised his superiors were letting him off duty. During the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, the night shift had often been held over to help. But he hadn't heard anything from his bosses, so he drove home to the Maryland suburbs and went to sleep. When he woke up, he saw on television what was happening and sped back, following an unmarked police car that had its lights flashing.
Meanwhile, officers belonging to the riot squad were making their way into the district to start their shifts. They could see throngs of people pouring out of Union Station, the railway hub within sight of the Capitol. They, too, were startled by the number of people on the streets that morning — it seemed that at every red light, a hundred demonstrators crossed in front of them. The officers hurried to prepare themselves for a long day.
At 10 a.m., as Trump supporters began to gather to listen to the president, the riot squad held roll call at a building a few blocks from the Capitol steps. There was little new to share from the intelligence division.
Instead, the riot squad's sergeants played clips found on social media: Videos of protesters meeting in cities across the country, getting ready to drive to DC. They told officers to make sure they had filters in their gas masks and snacks in their pockets.
With no real direction from their superiors, the sergeants tried to get their troops mentally prepared.
"You guys all drove in, you guys saw the same thing we did," one of the sergeants told the officers, according to members of the team.
"If something happens," another instructed,
"just find work."
The unit put on their riot gear: helmets and body armor. Shields were placed in strategic areas around the Capitol complex, though some officers later said they could not get to them.
One sergeant gave officers a final warning.
"If this goes good, then we'll laugh about it," he told them.
"But if it goes bad, it'll change your life and you'll never forget about it. They'll talk about this for years and years and years."
The riot squad members got on a bus to await their orders.
Sitting in his gear, one officer was struck by the age range of the people in attendance.
"People had their little kids, 2-year-olds, babies in strollers," he recalled. An elderly woman with a walker inched toward the Capitol:
"Every two steps, she has to stop and catch her breath."
After about an hour, the radio crackled: A possible bomb had been found outside the Republican National Committee headquarters, southeast of the Capitol complex. Capitol Police officers raced to the scene.
On the bus, the information did not set off panic. Suspicious packages are discovered all the time on the Hill; usually they are false alarms.
Then another, more urgent call went out. A 10-33, code for an officer in distress. An officer had been knocked backwards and hit her head on a flight of steps. The outer perimeter surrounding the west front of the Capitol had been breached.
Normally, the sergeants on the bus would wait for orders. But one snapped. "Fuck this, we're going," he said. The bus steered around the Capitol, barely squeezing between parked cars and protesters that had clogged a drive alongside the building.
Realizing they were effectively marooned, the sergeants ordered the riot squad off the bus. They began to walk across a wide lawn outside the Capitol.
As the officers drew closer, they realized that the lower section of the building's west terrace was guarded only by what is known as a "soft squad," officers with little protective gear dressed in neon yellow outerwear and baseball caps.
The rioters were attempting to pull away metal barricades known as "bike racks," and striking officers with their fists. With about 150 yards to go, the squad members broke into a dead sprint.
Once they reached the lower steps, the riot officers spread out behind the soft squad, tapping its members out, one by one. The riot squad came into formation in front of their less-protected colleagues: about two dozen officers attempting to hold 120 feet of open space, behind the line of barricades.
Looking out toward the Mall and the Washington Monument, the squad realized the grass had disappeared from view, blocked out by a crowd of thousands.
The attack: "Pick a side"
At about 1 p.m., Trump gave a rousing speech to protesters, suggesting they head to the Capitol to protest the election certification.
"We're going to walk down" to the Capitol, where they must
"fight," he said.
"We're going to the Capitol," he told the increasingly agitated crowd of protesters.
"We're going to try and give [Republicans] the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country."
Vice President Mike Pence had just arrived in the House Chamber. The lawmakers awaiting him still hadn't realized just how dire the situation was becoming.
To Sund, it was already clear that "the situation was deteriorating rapidly," he wrote in his letter.
He requested support from a number of agencies, including the Secret Service, and asked the sergeants-at-arms to authorize the National Guard and declare a state of emergency.
According to the letter, Sund recalled that Irving, the House sergeant-at-arms, said he "needed to run it up the chain of command."
Outside on the lower west terrace, the rioters had begun launching their offensive. At first, they pushed officers from across the bike racks, almost testing to see what they could get away with. Soon it became a fistfight. In what felt like minutes, it turned into an all-out brawl involving scores of armed rioters.
To the police on the line, it seemed like every time they shoved one protester back, three more surged ahead to take their place.
"Some of them, as they are holding a thin blue line flag, looked you dead in the eye and said, 'Pick a side,'" one officer told ProPublica.
One officer hit a demonstrator and watched a pistol pop out of the rioter's waistband. The officer picked the weapon up off the ground and, with no time or backup to initiate an arrest, put it in his pocket and continued fighting.
Plumes of tear gas billowed behind the police line. Officers were startled by the sight of department commanders joining their desperate troops to defend the Capitol.
Inspector Thomas Loyd, the man in charge of the department's Capitol Division, threw off his hat and raised his fists. Deputy Chief Eric Waldow waded into the crowd. With the build of a linebacker, he cut a menacing figure, throwing punches as the bear spray stained his white uniform orange.
The two are now revered by the department's rank and file, who complain that other leaders were missing in action. Waldow and Loyd referred ProPublica to the Capitol Police public information office, which declined to comment.
The only other high-ranking official who officers said they heard on the radio that day was Yogananda Pittman, the department's assistant chief for protective and intelligence operations.
Multiple officers told ProPublica that Pittman addressed the troops only once on the radio, when she ordered that the Capitol be locked down. Loyd, the union said in a public statement in January, had already given the same order about an hour before.
Elsewhere, another riot squad was in even worse shape. These officers had been dispatched to help quell a group of protesters gathered near a monument west of the Capitol. But they had been instructed by their superior officers to leave their gear on a bus. Now they were separated from the bus, defenseless.
"They were holding back some protesters, with just bike racks," said McFaden. "Well, those bike racks actually were used as weapons against the officers. Who had the bright idea of sending a hard squad with no gear? ... The coordination was just not there."
McFaden said that one member of that squad was hit in the head by a bike rack and knocked unconscious.
As the battle raged, officers stationed away from the combat were still trying to figure out if they were authorized to respond. They heard calls on their radios for "all available units." But officers at fixed posts didn't know what that meant.
"How the fuck am I supposed to know if I'm available?" thought one officer, stationed at a perimeter post with no rioters in sight. The officer's supervisors didn't know either. The group decided to stay put: If they left, there was a chance their post could be overrun. They were stuck listening to their colleagues fight and cry for help over the radio.
McFaden was also stationed away from the rioters, tasked with guarding a parking garage on the Rayburn House Office Building's west side. From his post, he had a clear view of the battle on the west front, but he'd received orders to stay at the garage entrance.
At 56 years old, he had worked for the Capitol Police House Division for more than 20 years. He was slated to retire in just a few weeks. Now he was watching, powerless, as flash-bang grenades went off in front of a building he was sworn to protect.
By this point, time had become a blur to the officers at the west front. But somewhere around 1:15 p.m., it felt for a moment like the cavalry arrived. Dozens of officers in black riot gear came over the wall on the south side of the terrace. Washington's Metropolitan Police Department, the only other members of law enforcement on the west front in riot gear that day, had arrived.
But the reinforcements could only slow the crowd. About an hour and a half after the Metropolitan police arrived, the rioters broke through the line.
In the melee, a rioter was captured on video hurling a fire extinguisher at the Capitol police. It struck an officer in the head, giving him a concussion, according to his colleagues.
That officer was one of at least two to be assaulted with such a device that day; another, Brian Sicknick, died from his injuries the following day.