Several Capitol police officers recalled getting beaten, sprayed, and threatened by the MAGA mob that descended on the US Capitol last Wednesday.
Among the cops who spoke out about their fight against thousands of far-right rioters during a press conference were officers Daniel Hodges, Christina Laury, and Michael Fanone.
As Hodges, who was recorded bleeding while crushed between a door by the mob, insisted, the rioters ripped off his mask and beat him with his own baton while he was crying out for help.
“There’s a guy ripping my mask off, he was able to rip away the baton and beat me with it. He was practically foaming at the mouth so just, these people were true believers in the worst way. You know things were looking bad,” he explained.
“I was calling out for all I was worth, and an officer behind me was able to get me enough room to pull me out of there and get me to the rear so I was able to extricate myself.”
According to Hodges, who admitted fearing for his life on January 6, the “zealotry of these people is absolutely unreal.”
Despite his fears and the dangerous position he was in, however, Hodges refused to start shooting because the police officers could easily get overrun by the heavily-armed mob.
“I didn’t want to be the guy who starts shooting, because I knew they had guns — we had been seizing guns all day. And the only reason I could think of that they weren’t shooting us was they were waiting for us to shoot first,” he told The Washington Post.
“And if it became a firefight between a couple hundred officers and a couple thousand demonstrators, we would have lost.”
Recalling the insurrection was also Officer Christina Laury who claimed that the police were attacked with bear mace.
“The individuals were pushing officers, hitting officers. They were spraying us with what we were calling, essentially, bear mace, because you use it on bears. Unfortunately, it shuts you down for a while,” she said.
“It’s way worse than pepper spray. It seals your eyes shut. You’ve got to spray and douse yourself with water. And in those moments it’s scary because you can’t see anything and have people that are fighting to get through.”
Meanwhile, Officer Michael Fanone, who is a father-of-four, said some rioters encouraged others to shoot him with his own gun after he got dragged away from the door he was securing and surrounded by the mob.
“Some guys started getting a hold of my gun and they were screaming out, ‘Kill him with his own gun.’ So, the other option I thought of was to try to appeal to somebody’s humanity. And I just remember yelling out that I have kids. And it seemed to work,” he said.
As Fanone admitted, some of the rioters attempted to protect him after his desperate plea.
Speaking of the insurrection, he added:
“We were getting chemical irritants sprayed. They had pipes and different metal objects, batons, some of which I think they had taken from law enforcement personnel. They had been striking us with those.
“It was just the sheer number of rioters. The force that was coming from that side. It was difficult to offer any resistance when you’re only about 30 guys going up against 15,000.”
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