Caroline Edwards, a Capitol police officer who sustained a brain injury during the January 6 attack, gave a chilling recollection of the brutal violence of that day on Thursday, telling the committee investigating the attack it was a “war scene”.
Her testimony offered key evidence for underscoring the stakes of the congressional hearing. It showed viewers at home that the attack on the Capitol in Washington DC was not an accident, but rather an intentional effort to inflict violence.
“I can remember my breath catching in my throat because what I saw was a war scene,” she told the committee. “Officers on the ground. They were bleeding, on the ground, throwing up,” she said.
“I was slipping in people’s blood,” she added. “I was catching people as they fell. It was carnage. It was chaos. I can’t even describe what I saw.”
Edwards is believed to have been one of the first officers injured during the attack, the New York Times reported last year. The committee played several clips of her being attacked.
She described standing near a barricade as members of the Proud Boys, a far-right group that played a key role in the violence, escalated their attack. She described telling her sergeant they would need more people to defend the Capitol before a bike rack was thrown on top of her and she hit her head on nearby stairs, causing her to black out.
But after regaining consciousness, Edwards, then 31, returned to defending the Capitol. “Adrenaline kicked in. I ran towards the west front, and I tried to hold the line at the Senate steps at the lower west terrace. More people kept coming at us.”
In her testimony, she recalled seeing a fellow police officer, Brian Sicknick, after he had been pepper-sprayed and how he was pale. “He was ghostly pale, which I figured at that point that he had been sprayed and I was concerned,” she said.
Sicknick died in the immediate aftermath of the attack but a medical examiner ultimately determined he died of a stroke. His mother and girlfriend attended the hearing on Thursday. After the hearing concluded, Edwards turned to his girlfriend, Sandra Garza, and said “I’m so sorry,” and hugged her, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Edwards didn’t hesitate when she was asked to recall a memory that stuck out to her from that day.
“It was something I’d seen out of the movies,” she said. “I saw friends with blood all over their faces,” she said. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think that as a police officer, as a 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,” She said. “That day, it was just hours of hand-to-hand combat.”
