Wild speculation abounds regarding today’s bizarre and fatal encounter today between various federal police agencies and a 34-year-old dental hygienist from Stamford, Connecticut, who beginning at 2:14 p.m. was first involved in some kind of confrontation at one of the White House gates.
With her infant daughter inside her black Infiniti luxury sports coupe, the driver, an attractive, pleasant-looking (based on her Facebook photos published by various news outlets, and a photo found on her employer’s website) African-American woman by the name of Miriam Carey, ran down a U.S. Secret Service officer with the car as she abruptly turned the car around after pulling up to the gate, then crashed away from the scene, jeopardizing the lives of numerous responding police and others as she raced at high speed toward Capitol Hill.
Even though police opened fire on her when she again crashed away from being momentarily boxed in by police as she neared The Hill, Carey eventually made it as far as the Hart senate office building adjacent to the Capitol, where her vehicle finally came to a stop by some concrete barricades after police opened fire a second time, killing her.
Fortunately, it is being reported by major news outlets that Carey’s daughter, estimated at between one and two years old, is okay. Conflicting reports are pouring in as to whether the child was injured in the melee or not, however all reports concur in saying that she is now safe and in protective custody, having been extricated from the car and carried away by police.
Much of the insane, violent chase was captured on video by a nearby TV crew, and was broadcast across news networks soon after the whole incident came to a close.
Like a scene out of a Hollywood action movie, part of the drama unfolded on camera–replete with police in vehicles and on foot closing in around the suspect’s briefly motionless car near the Capitol, seeming to trap her. Carey then suddenly crashed into a police cruiser in reverse, then gunned her coupe toward, then away from, the numerous officers who had drawn and pointed their weapons at her as they surrounded her car on foot, ordering her to desist and surrender. She defied them and almost ran officers over as she sped off, followed immediately by an audible barrage of police gunfire.
Whether any of those officers who had surrounded Carey’s car were able to see that there was a small child inside the car is, at this point, still an open question. If so, controversy is heaped on to what would otherwise be considered a clear-cut, justified use of deadly force situation.
Ordinary tourists don’t normally drive their cars up to the heavily fortified and staffed White House security gates, with small children inside, and then suddenly get into confrontations with the Secret Service, crashing over barriers and careening away as they bounce an officer off their car’s hood and onto the pavement, as witnesses are reported (by the Washington Post) to have described the scene. Witnesses are also reported to have described the guard who challenged Carey to be highly agitated and loud in his exhortations and warnings as she failed to stop or heed him: “The Secret Service guy was having a cow,” a man named B. J. Campbell said, “yelling at her and banging on the car.”
Never ones to miss an opportunity to grotesquely pounce on a crisis, at least two democrats in the House of Representatives (one of them the notorious Sheila Jackson Lee) have sought to exploit the incident in debate on the House floor, saying that it was directly the result of the opposing party’s stand regarding funding of Obamacare, and the ongoing deadlock over government operations.
I expect that we’ll know more about Miriam Carey in short order, and why she drove herself to her untimely end in the heart of our Capitol. Until we do, things remain very tense here, for reasons beyond her mysterious, deadly road rage.
