Victoria White, a January 6 Police Beating Victim Speaks: ‘I Could Have Died’
December 13, 2021 in News, Video by RBN Staff
Source: Need To Know | American Greatness
Victoria White, a 39-year old mother of four, recounted how at least two DC Metropolitan police officers viciously assaulted her with metal rods inside a tunnel on the lower west terrace of the Capitol building on January 6. Fierce battles between police and protesters took place inside the tunnel, which leads to a set of doors that allows access to the building. Cops clad in full riot gear had filled the tunnel with the gas, causing victims to vomit and pass out, and and people were being crushed. This is the is the location where Trump supporter Roseanne Boyland can be seen on video being beaten by a police officer just before she died.White’s attorney, Joseph McBride is petitioning the court to remove the protective order on the surveillance footage recorded by security cameras inside the tunnel so the American people can see what happened inside the tunnel on January 6. The footage allegedly shows officers savagely beating White. The Press Coalition, representing 16 major news corporations, has joined McBride’s request to make the three-hour video public.
Excerpt:
They approached the side of the Capitol building where staging for Joe Biden’s inauguration had been erected. People were climbing on the scaffolding, which looked to White like it was about to collapse. “My brothers are in construction so I knew the scaffolding wasn’t designed to hold that many people.” Fearful the structure would fall on top of her, White and her friend inched their way in the crowd closer to the building.
White then saw a man standing on a ledge near a window; as he attempted to break the glass, she began screaming at him. “I yelled, ‘we don’t do that shit’ and I grabbed his backpack to pull him off.” (Her account is confirmed by video and the government’s criminal complaint against her.)
The site of that confrontation is directly to the left of the lower west terrace tunnel. Looking for a way out of the dense crowd—she had lost sight of her friend at this point—White pushed her way toward the tunnel shortly after 4 p.m. and squeezed into the front opening.
That’s when she encountered a horror scene.
Grown men were crying, White said, from being doused repeatedly with a noxious chemical gas inside the tight confines of the tunnel. People were being crushed. Cops clad in full riot gear had filled the tunnel with the gas, causing victims to vomit and pass out.
“We were trapped. Police were pushing us out using riot shields and people outside were pushing in. I kept falling. A cop sprayed mace directly into my face.”
Then, she said, she felt the first blow.
It came out of nowhere, White told me. With her back to the line of officers, White tried to stand up but repeated blows to her head by an officer in a white shirt, presumably a D.C. Metro police supervisor, prevented her from regaining her footing.
“Because of my history, I started having flashbacks,” White told me slowly, choking up as she recalled what happened. “I felt like I had felt all those years, the times when I would get hit.” She remained crouched down as blow after blow, first by a stick then someone’s fist, landed on the top of her head and face. At one point, she confronted the abusive officer, reminding him “he took an oath to the Constitution.” Her remarks enraged the officer; he called her a “bitch” and continued the pummeling.
After several minutes, White was brought out of the tunnel by another officer. Her jacket, which she tied around her waist in the heated tunnel and contained her cell phone and money, was gone. So were her shoes. She was drenched in chemical spray.
For months after the attack, White thought she had been hit about three times. Either the effects of the suffocating chemical spray or survival instincts hardened after a decade of enduring domestic abuse seemingly anesthetized White from remembering all the brutal details.
It wasn’t until she finally viewed video evidence in June produced by the Justice Department under discovery in her criminal case that White realized the extent of the violent, almost sadistic, assault against her.
“I was absolutely horrified to see myself get hit and start to fall. There were multiple officers hitting people. One officer in a white shirt focused solely on me. He kept bashing and hitting me over and over.”
White described how the officer changed his grip on the metal rod—a device intended to break glass in emergencies, not to be used against human beings—to exact more force. “He begins to bash and poke me. Then another officer takes my hair and shakes my head back and forth.”
As if that weren’t enough, the supervisor wearing the white shirt starts hitting her directly in the face. “He takes his left hand, balls it up, and punches me in the face. I finally put my hand on my head and tried to grab his stick to get him to stop.”
Watching the full video, White said, triggered almost a PTSD response. “I really started to struggle, I don’t know if I can ever describe it, I was so overwhelmed.”
American Greatness: https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/08/150045/