Caroline Edwards, a U.S. Capitol Police officer who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, testified during the U.S. House select committee’s primetime hearing Thursday.
Edwards described defending the Capitol as “a war scene. It was something like I’d seen out of the movies. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
“I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood,” she said. “It was carnage. It was chaos.”
Edwards said although she worked in law enforcement, she wasn’t trained to handle the battle.
“I’m not combat trained,” she said. “And that day, it was just hours of hand-to-hand combat, hours of dealing with things that were way beyond any law enforcement officer has ever trained for.”
Edwards said she was outside the Capitol before the attack when members of the right-wing extremist group the Proud Boys began agitating law enforcement. She called her sergeant for reinforcements and was later knocked unconscious.
Edwards said on Jan. 6, 2021, she was called “Nancy Pelosi’s dog,” “incompetent” and “a traitor to my country” while defending the Capitol.
“In actuality, I was none of those things. I was an American standing face to face with other Americans asking myself how many times — many, many times how we had gotten here,” she said. “I had been called names before, but never had my patriotism or duty been called into question.”
Edwards testified along with British documentary filmmaker Nick Quested, who was filming members of the Proud Boys. Quested said before former President Donald Trump finished his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, hundreds of Proud Boys started marching toward the Capitol.
“I documented the crowd turn from protesters to rioters to insurrectionists,” Quested said. “I was surprised at the size of the group, the anger and the profanity. And for anyone who didn’t understand how violent that event was, I saw it, I documented it and I experienced it.”