WASHINGTON (AP) — Long after most other lawmakers had been rushed to safety, they were on the hard marble floor, ducking for cover.
Trapped in the gallery of the House, occupying balcony seats off-limits to the public because of COVID-19, roughly three dozen House Democrats were the last ones to leave the chamber on Jan. 6, bearing witness as the certification of a presidential election gave way to a violent insurrection.
As danger neared, and as the rioters were trying to break down the doors, they called their families. They scrambled for makeshift weapons and mentally prepared themselves to fight. Many thought they might die.
“When I looked up, I had this realization that we were trapped,” said Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., a former Army Ranger who served three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. “They had evacuated the House floor first. And they forgot about us.”
Bound together by circumstance, sharing a trauma uniquely their own, the lawmakers were both the witnesses and the victims of an unprecedented assault on American democracy. Along with a small number of staffers and members of the media, they remained in the chamber as Capitol Police strained to hold back the surging, shouting mob of supporters of then-President Donald Trump.
The lawmakers were finally taken to safety roughly an hour after the siege began.
Interviewed by The Associated Press before this week’s anniversary of the attack, 10 of the House members who were in the gallery talked of being deeply shaken by their experience, recalling viscerally the sights and sounds amid the chaos.
Vividly they remember the loud, hornetlike buzz of their gas masks. The explosive crack of tear gas in the hallways outside. The screams of officers telling them to stay down. The thunderous beating on the doors below. Glass shattering as the rioters punched through a window pane. The knobs rattling ominously on the locked doors just a few feet behind them.
And most indelibly, the loud clap of a gunshot, reverberating across the cavernous chamber.
“I’ve heard a lot of gunshots in my time, and it was very clear what that was,” Crow said. “I knew that things had severely escalated.”
The shot was fired by Officer Michael Byrd and killed Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter from California who was trying to crawl through the broken window of a door that leads to the House chamber. Both the Justice Department and Capitol Police investigated the shooting and declined to file charges.
While the gunshot dispersed some of the violent mob, the lawmakers ducking in the gallery believed the worst was just beginning.
“I think all of us, myself included, had images of a mass-shooting event,” said Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., who posted video updates on Twitter as the chaos unfolded. “It was terrifying in the moment.”
Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., said he could tell the gunshot had come from the back of the chamber, in the Speaker’s Lobby just outside, and not from the main doors on the opposite side where they could see rioters trying to break through. In that moment he realized why they couldn’t leave — they were surrounded. “It was in stages that you realized the severity,” he said.
Their terror was compounded by knowledge of what the mob was after: stopping Congress from certifying the Electoral College votes that would make Joe Biden the 46th president of the United States. Mike Pence, as is customary for the vice president, had been presiding over the ceremony in the House chamber where lawmakers were gathered to hear the certified results from all 50 U.S. states and the territories.
