The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors next month will honor the efforts of local police to restore and maintain order at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
With the attack’s five-year anniversary nearing, the board voted 9-0 at its Dec. 9 meeting in support of a proposed commemorative proclamation sponsored by supervisors Rodney Lusk (Franconia) and Dan Storck (Mount Vernon) with Chairman Jeff McKay.
“I don’t want anyone to ever forget what happened that day,” McKay said. “Most importantly, I don’t want the law-enforcement officers who put their lives on the line to think we’ve ever forgotten what happened to them that day.”
The proclamation is expected to be presented at an upcoming Board meeting. The lone full Board meeting next month will be held on Tuesday, Jan. 13.
In response to rioting at the Capitol, members of the Fairfax County Police Department’s Civil Disturbance Unit were sent to D.C. as part of the region’s mutual-aid compacts.
While no Fairfax personnel sustained direct injuries related to Jan. 6 events, the experience took a major toll on participants and represented something that “can affect you for the rest of your life,” McKay said at the Dec. 9 meeting.
At the time of the incident, McKay called the attack on the Capitol, which occurred as Congress was certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election, “nothing short of a coup.” At the Dec. 9 meeting, he said it was “something we thought we would never see.”
In August 2022, members of the Civil Disturbance Unit were invited back to the Capitol, where they were thanked for their efforts a 18 months earlier.
Last week, members of our Civil Disturbance Unit who responded to the Capitol on January 6 were invited back to the Capitol. Thanks @CapitolPolice for the behind-the-scenes tour! pic.twitter.com/5l5tilt4qI
— Fairfax County Police (@FairfaxCountyPD) August 15, 2022
All supervisors voted to support the measure honoring the Capitol responders. The Braddock District seat was vacant awaiting the outcome of a special election that day, which resulted in a victory for Democrat Rachna Sizemore Heizer.
Storck said he also would like to honor “all the people since [2021] who have worked diligently to hold to account those who attacked our democracy.”
“Those individuals equally have suffered greatly,” he said.
The first evening of his return to office in January 2025, President Donald Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,500 people connected to the Jan. 6 incident.
“These people have been destroyed,” Trump said of those convicted of offenses related to the episode, accusing the Biden administration of malicious prosecution.
As part of the proclamation, the county’s public affairs staff were directed to work with the FCPD to include the names of any first responders to the Jan. 6 attack who were Fairfax County residents and died “as a result of the events that took place that day.”
As of fall 2022, nine deaths had been tied to the attack on the Capitol, including four participants in the crowd and five police officers. Four of the police officers died by suicide in the subsequent days and months, two of them in July 2022, after the Senate released a report reviewing the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
Then-President Joe Biden signed legislation in August 2022 that allowed suicides to be classified as line-of-duty deaths as long as they’re linked to traumatic events that the officer experienced as part of their work, enabling their families to be eligible for federal benefits.
