What officers faced on Jan. 6
Gonell was among the officers who defended the Capitol’s West Front entrance on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress certified Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential victory and hundreds of Trump supporters broke into the building. Gonell was dragged into the crowd by his shoulder straps as he fought to hold his position. He said he almost suffocated. Injuries to his shoulder and foot still bother him, he said, and he ultimately left the Capitol Police because of them.
He has not returned to service. He wrote a book about his experience and said he still has post-traumatic stress disorder related to the attack. “They have tried to erase what I did” with the pardons and other attempts to play down the violent attack, Gonell said. “I lost my career, my health, and I’ve been trying to get my life back.”
Officer Daniel Hodges, a Metropolitan Police Department officer who fought near Gonell in a tunnel on the Capitol’s West Front, said the past year had been particularly hard. Hodges was attacked multiple times during the assault — crushed between heavy doors by the crowd and beaten in the head as he screamed for help.
“It’s been a difficult year,” Hodges said. “A lot of things are getting worse.”
Pardons draw officers’ criticism
Former District of Columbia police officer Adam Eveland, who fought the attackers and helped push them off Capitol grounds, said he had difficulty reconciling the pardons. “I’ve had a hard time processing that,” Eveland said. If pardons were to be granted at all, he said, Trump’s administration should have reviewed each case individually. “I think that was wrong,” Eveland said.
Former Capitol Police Officer Winston Pingeon, who was part of the department’s Civil Disturbance Unit and was attacked and knocked to the ground while trying to prevent people from entering the Capitol, said the pardons “erased what little justice there was.” He left the force several months after Jan. 6 and moved home to Massachusetts.
Trump has called the rioters he pardoned, including those convicted of assaulting officers, “patriots” and “hostages.” He called their convictions “a grave national injustice.”
Senate hearing, public pushback
Hodges and Gonell have spoken publicly about their experiences since July 2021, when they testified before the Democratic-led House committee that investigated Jan. 6. Hodges testified again in October at a Republican-led Senate hearing on political violence, where he was called as a witness by Democrats. After Hodges described his experience, Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., asked the other witnesses at the hearing whether they supported Trump’s pardons of the rioters, including those who had injured Hodges. Three of the witnesses, all called by Republicans, raised their hands.
“I don’t know how you would say it wasn’t violent,” Hodges said.
Pushback has come not only from elected officials, officers said, but from people they know. “My biggest struggle through the years has been the public perception of it,” Eveland said. He said navigating conversations with people close to him — including some fellow police officers — who do not regard the events of Jan. 6 as a serious matter has been one of the hardest parts of the years since.
“It’s hard for me to wrap my head around that, but ideology is a pretty powerful thing,” Eveland said.
Department rebuilt after the attack
Former Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger, who took over the department six months after the riot and retired in May, said he found officers who were angry when he arrived — not only because of the injuries they suffered, but because they lacked the equipment and training needed to handle the crowd. There were no wellness or counseling services in place when he arrived, he said, and he established them.
Manger also oversaw improvements to training, equipment, operational planning, and intelligence. He said the Capitol is now “a great deal safer” than it was when he arrived.
“If that exact same thing happened again, they would have never breached the building, they would have never gotten inside, they would have never disrupted the electoral count,” Manger said.
Pingeon, who left the force and moved home to Massachusetts, said the department is in many ways “unrecognizable” from what it was on Jan. 6. “It was a wake-up call,” he said.
Officers describe how they have coped
Pingeon said he has dealt with his experience by painting images of the Capitol and his time there, and by advocating for nonviolence. He said he now feels ready to forgive. “The real trauma and heartache and everything I endured because of these events, I want to move past it,” he said.
Eveland said he decided to speak publicly about Jan. 6 because he believed it was important to approach the subject from a factual standpoint. He acknowledged the limits of that effort.
“I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that just because something happened to me and was a major part of my world doesn’t mean that everyone else has to understand that or even be sympathetic to that,” Eveland said. “The only thing I can do is tell my story, and hopefully the people who respect me will eventually listen.”