Five officers who tried to stop assailants from the Capitol in Washington in January have since died. Four of them committed suicide: two not long after the storming, two in recent weeks. The latest suicide was announced by police this morning. It concerns 43-year-old Gunther Hashida.
It is a striking statistic, although the police do not yet want to make a direct link between the events on January 6 and the suicides. However, it is clear that many police officers are still struggling with mental problems after the storming.
Too often they don’t seek help, says correspondent Marieke de Vries. “Agents can participate in the Employee Assistance Program. That is therapy under the supervision of psychologists, which is always offered when agents have experienced a serious event. But this is seen as a sign of weakness among themselves.”
Ordinary Americans
De Vries spoke today on the basis of anonymity with an agent who was also present in Capitol that day. The agent said that colleagues are often too proud to seek help: “They’d rather hoard it”.
He also described what made that day so traumatic in particular. “How can people do this? They were just Americans. If they were a bunch of crazy foreign terrorists, we still knew what we were fighting. But now you wondered: who’s who? You don’t want to betray your compatriots either. That makes it hard to handle.”
President Biden calls the killed officers heroes:
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