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| A damaged Capitol Hill police care is surrounded by crime scene tape after a car chase and shooting on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2013. A woman driving a black Infiniti with a young child inside tried to ram through a White House barricade Thursday, then led police on a chase that ended in gunfire outside the Capitol, witnesses and officials said. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- A woman with a 1-year-old girl led Secret Service and police on a
harrowing car chase from the White House past the Capitol Thursday,
attempting to penetrate the security barriers at both national landmarks
before she was shot to death, police said. The child survived.
"I'm
pretty confident this was not an accident," said Metropolitan Police
Chief Cathy Lanier. Still, Capitol Police said there appeared to be no
terrorist link. Authorities would not say whether the woman had been
armed.
Tourists, congressional staff and even
some senators watched as a caravan of law enforcement vehicles chase a
black Infiniti with Connecticut license plates down Constitution Avenue
outside the Capitol. House and Senate lawmakers, inside debating how to
end a government shutdown, briefly shuttered their chambers as Capitol
Police shut down the building.
The woman's car
at one point had been surrounded by police cars and she managed to
escape, careening around a traffic circle and past the north side of the
Capitol. Video shot by a TV camerman showed police pointing firearms at
her car before she rammed a Secret Service vehicle and continued
driving. Lanier said police shot and killed her a block northeast of the
historic building.
One Secret Service member
and a 23-year veteran of the Capitol Police were injured. Officials said
they are in good condition and expected to recover.
"This
appears to be an isolated, singular matter, with, at this point, no
nexus to terrorism," said Capitol Police Chief Kim Dine.
The
pursuit began when the car sped onto a driveway leading to the White
House, over a set of lowered barricades. When the driver couldn't get
through a second barrier, she spun the car in the opposite direction,
flipping a Secret Service officer over the hood of the car as she sped
away, said B.J. Campbell, a tourist from Portland, Ore.
Then the chase began.
"The
car was trying to get away. But it was going over the median and over
the curb," said Matthew Coursen, who was watching from a cab window when
the Infiniti sped by him. "The car got boxed in and that's when I saw
an officer of some kind draw his weapon and fire shots into the car."
Police
shot and killed the driver just outside the Hart Senate Office
Building, where many senators have their offices. Dine said an officer
took the child from the car to a hospital. She is in good condition
under protective custody, officials said.
A few senators between the Capitol and their office buildings said they heard the shots.
"We
heard three, four, five pops," said Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa. Police
ordered Casey and nearby tourists to crouch behind a car for protection,
then hustled everyone into the Capitol.
Others witnessed the incident, too.
"There
were multiple shots fired and the air was filled with gunpowder," said
Berin Szoka, whose office at a technology think tank overlooks the
shooting scene.
The shooting comes two weeks
after a mentally disturbed employee terrorized the Navy Yard with a
shotgun, leaving 13 people dead including the gunman.
Before
the disruption, lawmakers had been trying to find common ground to end a
government shutdown. The House had just finished approving legislation
aimed at partly lifting the government shutdown by paying National Guard
and Reserve members.
Capitol Police on the plaza around the Capitol said they were working without pay as the result of the shutdown.
