Historical plaque
By Dominick Tricoche ’25 / Art created by Will Fuller ’16
It is January 6, 2021, on the Upper West Terrace-North of the US Capitol, and I am trying to get to a fellow officer who’s been overrun by “peaceful protestors,” all while being physically assaulted by bats and tear gas and verbally assaulted by the word “nigger.” I am a Capitol Police Officer. But if I’m a Capitol Police Officer, can I also be a “nigger?” I’m certainly Black because, according to some of the crowd at the Black Lives Matter protest in the spring of 2020, I was an “Uncle Tom” and a “race traitor.” You can dodge a brick, a rock, or a bottle, but you can’t dodge a word—a label—especially one that takes away your basic humanity… But I’m getting ahead of myself here because, if I'm being honest, for me, January 6 began like any other charged day at the Capitol during the Trump presidency: hectic, but not out of the ordinary.
I got up having only vague notions of what was playing out in the city; my main priorities for the day were taking my friend, Melanie, to her doctor’s appointment, and lounging around hanging out with my dog, Archer, catching up on some rest. I was using some vacation days I had earned over the past six months with all the mandatory overtime. The 12 or 16-hour shifts, with one or no days off a week, had definitely started to take their toll. But as I sat in the hallway of the doctor’s office, text messages began to flood into my shift’s group chat, messages that I was first inclined to ignore. After all, I was off, and technically I worked midnights, and wasn’t obligated to do anything. “Guys this is serious, they need help.” Like a lightning bolt, that message reverberated through my spine. They… I thought of my coworkers, but more importantly my friend, Justin Nixon, who I knew was currently at the Capitol on duty. There wasn’t much info to go on, neither from our group chat nor from the news at the time, which was around 11:30–noonish, but something started shaking within me, action starting to dance within my bones, like the first bubbles starting to form on the bottom of a pot of boiling water. Melanie, also a coworker, came out of her appointment, immediately asking what was wrong. I said exactly what I knew, which was nothing, other than what was in the group chat: a call for help.
When we got back to her apartment, we turned on the news: “Protest at the Capitol;” “Riot on Capitol Hill;” “Trump Supporters March on the Capitol.” I’m sure we’ve all seen the footage by now, thousands of people surrounding the Capitol Building on all sides. It was surreal: a moment that looked like it could have been out of a movie was playing out in real time… at the place I work… a place that I should be at this very moment, if it wasn’t for some fortuitous vacation planning. I spent my childhood being fed movies like Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers, and Saving Private Ryan, and I always wondered about being in a maelstrom like that, and now here it was. For all the places that the cameras were showing on TV, the only thing I could think of was all the places they couldn’t see and all the places they didn’t have cameras: the Capitol Visitors’ Center (CVC), the House Floor, the Capitol Detail Office, all places the general public wouldn’t see on film for days, weeks, or even months to come. All the places that my friend might be, and another feeling started to surge within me.
When I was being photographed for an interview about January 6, the photographer said he thought it was awesome that when the shit hits the fan, I take action… I just go. I asked him what he meant by that. He told me that I was someone who just goes, someone who doesn’t hesitate. What an interesting way to think of what transpired, as if, even here, it was black and white: those who go, and those who don’t. It’s far more complicated than that, and it certainly wasn’t instantaneous. Yes, I went, but not without suppressing the feeling that surged within me, that icy grip that clutches the inside of your ribcage and travels through your spine: fear. Yes, I went, but not without wrestling with: What am I going to do about Archer? I wonder where Nixon is, and would I even be able to find him? I don’t give a fuck about that building, burn it to the ground. I need to protect those people, I need to be there. I can’t leave now, Melanie can’t go and that will crush her. All those things became a paralytic cacophony within my head, but then: “Shots fired on the House floor.” The dam had broken, thought now flooded into action. I got dressed, took Archer to Melanie’s place (I wasn’t sure how long I would be gone, and yes, the thought of death did cross my mind), and drove to the Capitol.
The following March, after January 6, I left the Capitol Police, and spent the next several months on my parent’s couch in Levittown, PA. My parent’s house is similar to all the other houses in Levittown, one of the nation’s first planned communities. As kids, me and my friends rode our bikes from one end of town to the other and it never crossed our minds that anything was odd here, even though I was one of only three Black kids in the neighborhood… the sameness provided us with structure and, anyway, who cared what houses looked like. The kids living in Pinewood, my neighborhood, all attended Walt Disney Elementary School. Disney himself came to the school's dedication in 1955; there is a picture of him and a historical plaque commemorating the event in the lobby.
It wasn’t fear when I first saw the crowd, but rather a cold recognition that the thing I was encountering was truly foreign and alien to my perception and understanding of the word. As I sat there in my car looking up at the Capitol Building in front of me, and then at the masses of people moving around outside my car, I thought I was looking at a different species: the way these people moved, the way they shouted and chanted, it was like looking at a creature devoid of reason and sentience, like someone put under a spell. I got out of my car and was met with Morales’ pallid face telling me that Reyes was around the corner. I don’t know if I responded, I think I just turned and started making for the Longworth Building; I knew we could enter there and make our way through the underground tunnel connecting the House Office buildings and the Capitol.
As we made it to the entrance of the Longworth, Reyes caught up with us. Let’s fucking go! Reyes, always full of piss and vinegar, was such a contrast to Morales, who seemed genuinely disturbed. We ran through the Longworth Building—alarms and emergency messages resounding throughout—down the stairs into the basement, into the tunnel connecting the Rayburn Building and the Capitol, where we saw several officers, between six and a dozen, just sitting around, on their phones, doing nothing. We made it to elevators, and took them to the first floor where we were greeted with the sight and smell of blood, and the sound of chaos. They were just in the process of medevacing the woman who had been shot, and a trail of blood lingered as they made their way outside to the ambulance. At this point in time there was no semblance of cohesion or command among the law enforcement in the building—US Marshals, DC Metro, Amtrak Police, FBI, Park Police, and others—so we decided to make our own way to where we were needed, wherever that was.
There was a game designed in the 70’s called “Conway’s Game of Life.” It was a game designed to highlight the simple symmetry of the universe. It consists of hundreds of grid-squares, called “cells,” and is played by turning the cells on or off. On, or off. Alive, or dead. According to the game, those are the two basic conditions to which all life can be broken down. Simple, an object is, or it is not. But to be something is to not be something else. So, if I am a “nigger,” does that mean I am not: a man, a free man, a student, a poet, a brother, a son, a lover, a person, a human?
Our first thought was to head upstairs to the rotunda, so we made our way to one of the grand staircases. We could hear it before we could see it. Screaming. Banging. Clanging. Spraying… It looked like a scene from a medieval war movie: two large groups engaged in an all-out melee, some clad in armor, the garb of riot police officers and civilians, who were surprisingly well armed for “peaceful protesters,” all against the backdrop of the Greco-Roman inspired US holy chamber (according to the plaque on the wall, the painting in the rotunda is literally called The Apotheosis of Washington), replete with marble statues and paintings of fighting angels. But, before we could enter the brawl, over the radio a call came out asking for help at North Door, so we made our way back downstairs and headed north.
When we were about 30 yards away, we could see a handful of officers (Capitol Police, DC Metro, and FBI) attempting to drive the rioters back out the door so that they could secure it. I noticed more than a dozen officers crying or lying down or standing around in a small, side hallway, but didn’t think anything of it until we got to the door itself, then it all started to click. The reason there was only one Capitol Police Officer, and the reason that all of the people were getting sick in the hallway, was because the North Door vestibule was laden with a wonderful cocktail of chemical irritants donated by both parties. Filling that small space was our own Sabre Red (pepper spray), tear gas, fire extinguisher coolant, civilian pepper spray, and bear mace. This made it very difficult to breathe if you didn’t have a gas mask or respirator; fortunately, I had my handy-dandy Oakley facemask, which provided a little bit of protection. Morales, Reyes, and I jumped into the fray, helping to force the last few people back outside. For all the buildup to this moment, our actual start into the fray was pretty mild. The last five or six people that were still putting up a fight had already been pushed out of the interior door into the vestibule, which was a victory. In between the bouts of coughing and the fits of hacking trying to breathe in the fetid air swirling around us, we managed to chain the interior North Door shut with zip cuffs. But just as we fastened the last cuff a call came through stating there were two officers stuck and surrounded by the crowd on the Upper West Terrace–North—right outside the door we just secured and tied shut. I shouted to get the door open and in a matter of seconds the ties were cut. We rushed into the vestibule and were ready to head outside when we were stopped dead in our tracks. The rioters had slid bike racks in front of the exterior door, locking us in.
Me, Morales, Reyes, and the other officers slammed into the door, pushing, kicking, doing everything to get those bike racks out of the way so that we could make it outside to the stranded officers. As we did this, the rioters continued to spray and throw whatever they could to try and impede us. My mask was giving me some protection but Reyes was not as lucky. When a particularly well aimed shot of mace came through the door, he took the full brunt of it in the face. Morales quickly grabbed Reyes and took him back inside to decontaminate him, just as we managed to get the exterior door open. I was the first one out the door. Let’s go! We’ve got officers stranded out here! I remember thinking I sounded like such an asshole, like someone from one of those movies I used to watch. As I stepped out, no one came with me.
As you enter Levittown from the north you come across a historical plaque erected in 1992 that reads, "This fully planned, six-home style residential community was conceived by the builder William J. Levitt. The first family moved in, June 23, 1952. When completed in 1957, Levittown contained 17,311 homes on 5,750 acres, designed for a population of 70,000. It expanded on the pattern set by Levittown, NY (built 1947-51) and was a landmark in the development of suburban housing in the United States." The plaque does not mention William J. Levitt's "whites only" covenant for owning homes in communities he built.
After taking my first steps onto Upper West Terrace–North, the only thing I thought was, I’m going to die. It was a strange sensation—not a fearful realization, or a pitiful admission—like a fact: I was one guy, and there were literally thousands of people standing in front of me with intent to do me physical harm. I continued outside, walking down the steps further onto the terrace, and spotted the officers in question. Before I reached the bottom of the steps I was greeted with yet another bike rack, this one thrown at my feet. I fell face first down the stairs all while being called a “nigger.” As I tried to get back on my feet, I was grabbed and hoisted up. I looked at the man grabbing me—his face was calm, serene even, he was saying not to worry, that they had me… That it was all good… He then dusted me off and patted me on the back. The second between that moment and the next dragged on forever, I could see everything: the man that helped me up, the people foaming at the mouth, shouting, cursing, and throwing stuff at me… The old lady watching in stupefied awe at her surroundings, waving a Trump flag like she was at a Sunday picnic; another lady spraying pepper spray at my fellow officer, Fuss, who was in the fetal position, and the young man with a camera documenting it all… There was no uniformity on either side, some officers were terrified, some officers were eager; some protesters were out to hurt us, some were just out here.
I try to break myself down into component parts, into a zero or one. As I attempt to sort through all these labels, I’m taken back to my childhood, to another word: "blight." Not blight as in disease, but blight, or blite, as in “black-light,” or “black-white.” Associated terms include “oreo,” “uh-oh oreo,” “niglet,” “nig-nog,” “moon-cricket,” and “jungle cricket,” all terms that I acquired through the years in the public school system from various sources, including friends, teammates, coaches, and teachers.
I made my way to Fuss, picked him up off the ground, and shouted at the crowd to move back and give him some space. By this time a few other officers—DC Metro Police—had joined me on the terrace, and they grabbed Fuss and escorted him inside. I went to grab the second officer, Stockhecker, who had been sprayed in the face with mace. I grabbed him and we made our way through the crowd back toward North Door, luckily only having to dodge insults instead of physical attacks. Just a little bit further and we’d be inside, safe to re-secure the door and attempt to lockdown the building again (side note, one thing that people don’t realize, is that when the protesters made their way into the Capitol they pulled the fire alarms which ensured that the exterior doors could not be locked without the system being reset. Essentially, we were unable to secure all the doors as the crowds came in). I started to make my way up the stairs toward North Door.
White… a flash of white… it’s so loud. Can sound have a color… and an odor? There’s an odor I can’t identify… no, not an odor: an odor isn’t physical, and this is forcing itself into my nostrils, I can feel it, I can taste it… something in my eyes… I can’t see… I can’t see… I gotta get it out of my eyes… it’s covering me… is it alive? I feel like it’s crawling all over me… I can feel it in my ears… it’s in my mask… I can’t hear… I gotta be close to the door… my god what is that taste? What is that odor? I can hear… I can hear my name…
Tricoche! Yo! You good?! I could hear Morales but I couldn’t see him. Yo, come get washed off! In movies and TV shows, when they show people using fire extinguishers, it’s usually depicted as a white gas or smoke; what they don’t show is the fact that most fire extinguishers are what’s known as ABC, or dry chemical extinguishers, which use monoammonium phosphate and ammonium sulfate powder. When you spray them at someone point blank into their face, it doesn't just blow their hair back with some white smoke, it douses them in a chemical powder, the powder that now covered me from head to toe, coating the inside of my mask and mouth.
I made my way to the hallway and joined the other officers attempting to use the small bathroom sink to clean our faces and rinse out our eyes, noses, and mouths. Once I cleaned myself up enough to have my vision back, I noticed the dozens of empty water bottles and spent Sabre Red cans strewn about the floor, and for a moment I felt bad for whoever was going to have to clean this up later, the reactivation of all the chemicals was going to be rough on them.
As if all this chaos wasn’t enough, another officer was running around panicking, looking for an automated external defibrillator (AED), as they needed one on the West Front for a civilian who had collapsed. It’s a fascinating phenomenon when there’s just so much going on, so much sensory input, so many options for action; watching the sheer amount of information and choice paralyze a person, the gears behind their eyes spinning so fast that they seize, and all activity stops. The AED-searching officer had that look in his eyes. I took him to where I knew there was one, then sent him out the back door. As he left I peeked my head out and caught a glimpse of the melee, now Helm’s Deep-esque in scale and ferocity. Even though I was only barely outside it was enough for me to notice the sheer difference in air quality: Breathing inside was still like being in a fetid, toxic, chemical swamp—for a moment I wondered if this wasn’t actually the chemical irritants I was smelling, but rather the presence and smell of fear, which was just as potent.
Levittown was built specifically for the housing of returning GIs after World War II, and, thus, most of the homeowners were soldiers, sailors, airmen, and their families. In fact, Levittown homes were sold to servicemen without a downpayment, making them incredibly affordable and accessible. Thousands of soldiers, men trained to exist in uniformity, flocked to a community built with that concept embedded in its foundations. A community that created a horrifying fractal-like experience: no matter where you zoom-in or zoom-out, it all looks the same. In war, the enemy can be identified by one who is not wearing the same uniform, as one who does not look like you. In war, you attack the enemy, you kill it. What do soldiers do when they aren’t at war, when they’re in suburbia? What does combat look like in the suburbs? It looks like people standing outside of the home of the first Black family—the Myers—to move into Levittown in 1957. The Myers lived on the corner of Daffodil and Deep Green lanes. William and Daisy Myers moved to a place built by a man who refused to sell homes to Black families, a place of uniformity. As a child, I spent countless hours just up the street and around the bend from the Myers home at a family friend’s, on Dewberry Lane. Listen to the names of streets of Levittown: Daffodil, Deep Green, Dewberry…perfectly placid words that hide the menace of the people who stood outside the Myers' home with signs letting them know they did not belong.
Coming back again to North Door, there was only a brief respite before I was told it was time for us to start moving back up towards the Rotunda and aid the officers up there in pushing the rest of the rioters back outside of the Capitol. We made our way through what is known as the Crypt first, which was now being used as a CCP (casualty collection point), before making our way up to the Rotunda. In the Crypt, dozens of officers in various different uniforms, belonging to myriad different agencies, lay strewn about the floor in various states of injury and fatigue. Further up the hallway, the AED had delivered its report on its patient and now CPR was needed. As I ran by, still covered in white powder from the fire extinguisher, some people looked at me as if I were a ghost—but I was a living ghost, unlike the CPR patient.
We were up the stairs and back in the Rotunda. By the time I made my way through the crowd of officers and to the door, I was greeted with a surprise: Nixon. When you work a job in which everyone wears the exact same uniform every day, you begin to be able to pick people out by their haptics, by the way they hold themselves. Even though Nixon was wearing full Civil Disturbance Unit (the polite way of saying "riot squad") equipment, I was able to pick him out no problem. I pushed my way up through the group and slapped him on the shoulder pad.
Hey, man…what are you doing here? His eyes really took me in. What happened to you?! Are you alright?
Come on, you didn’t think I’d miss all of this did you? I couldn’t let you guys do this alone. And this? Oh, Morales says they got me with a fire extinguisher when I was trying to come back inside. I’m good. You good?
Yeah man, I’m good. Crazy. Just crazy.
You seen Hoyte?
Earlier. I haven’t seen him in a while, we got separated.
Just as we were talking, an officer—Capitol Police for sure—no other department would have someone in an event as crazy as this with a uniform as pristine and clean as this woman’s—entered and attempted to get all of our attention. It was impressive and insulting at the same time, what could she have possibly been doing this entire day to not have a single wrinkle, a single speck of dust on her white uniform? I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but it became clear through the actions of the other officers that it was time to lock down this door. The plan was to have the officers in hard gear (riot gear) establish a perimeter outside so the officers inside could secure and lock the door. The hard gear officers would be locked outside once the officers inside secured the door; locked outside with an angry mob. What happened next was exactly that: Nixon, being the only officer at the door in hard gear at the time, walked outside expecting to have support but quickly found himself alone on the other side of a locked door.
When I ask myself where the people I grew up around picked up their casual racism, the answer is all too apparent: it's built into the very foundations of the towns in which they all grew up and it lives in their mouths, in their arteries, in their hearts, like bacteria—like plaque.
It was my job, along with the few other midnight officers that managed to trickle in, to do a sweep of the interior of the Capitol, searching for any people or explosives that might still be lingering around. I spent my whole Capitol Police career, about four years, on midnights walking around in the dead of night: 11 p.m.–7 a.m. I walked in the cold, in the snow, in the heat, and in the rain. I walked in dark empty office buildings; in dank, decrepit basements, and derelict attics; chambers dating back to our nation's inception, surely filled with the ghosts of pompous white men. Never was I more frightened walking around than I was in the Capitol in the aftermath of January 6, and never was I more exhausted. The day had started to take its toll, and my body was finally running out of adrenaline. It’s a moment that they train you for, so you know when you’re most vulnerable, when mistakes are most likely to happen. Had I already missed something? What if I missed a closet door in that last office? Did I check under that second desk? I can’t remember. Moomau said she was going into this room, didn’t she? Or did she say she was going into the next one? What if I’m searching for someone who’s at least as good at evasion as I am, would I be able to catch myself?
But then a call over the radio: They were sending in the K-9 units to do sweeps of the building and they didn’t need us anymore. I made my way out of the labyrinthine bowels of the Capitol to the East Front and found some of my shift mates. It was just before 10 p.m., all of us there technically before our shift started. We had no official duties or posts to return to at the moment, we just enjoyed the cool air, and the strange sight of National Guard APCs (armored personnel carriers) rolling onto the deck.
According to “Conway’s Game of Life,” to be something is to not be something else, but I don’t believe that. I know I am a complex of Black and white, man and student, poet and brother, son, lover, person, human… and I think back to the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s inaugural character, "I know myself, but that is all."
Nixon made his way over to us, saying he was going to go grab his stuff from the CVC. I went with him, having nothing better to do. In order to get back down there we went through the Crypt, where the CCP was, and we found Hoyte sitting upright on a gurney, arm in a sling and hand wrapped in bandages. Despite the obvious pain, he couldn’t hide his excitement at seeing us.
...What the fuck.., he said. We all just laughed, what else was there to say? Hoyte filled us in on what happened to him: someone had hit him with a pipe in the collar bone and hand, he’d be recovering from this injury for months afterwards. We shared a moment of levity on a terrible day, and it reaffirmed what I had known before I even came to the Capitol: the only reason I came was for these two, for my friends. The medics took Hoyte to the ambulance. Nixon and I made our way back down into the basement of the Capitol into the CVC, which was now open again, the lockdown being over. There was no one else down there, normal for midnights, but for some reason, now, it was strange. Perhaps it was because we knew, even if not consciously at that moment, that it would be months, if not longer, before the CVC was filled with visitors again: this silence was now everyone's norm, not just ours.
When I was growing up, there was no historical plaque in Levittown commemorating how the Myers were forced to endure three solid months of harassment, intimidation, cross burning, and 24-hour police protection. No plaque stating the mob that stood outside the Myers' home was not a homogenized group: some were curious, some violent, some there only because their neighbors were, and others looking to stop anything like this from happening again. There was no plaque stating that in Levittown, PA, on the corner of Daffodil and Deep Green Lanes, William and Daisy Myers refused to back down to all that mindless hate.
Nixon and I sat on the floor of the CVC for an hour, maybe longer. I wish I had the words to describe that conversation to you, to explain what Nixon’s smile looked like behind all that fatigue. I wish I could show you my hand, how it was bruised and shaking, swollen up so much that I couldn’t touch any fingers to my thumb. I wish I could give intimate details as to what we said, what we talked about, but I can’t. There are certain things in this world that are ineffable... But I will say this: in the aftermath of that day, despite all that happened, two friends sat next to each other, laughed, and shared a moment of happiness.
Of course, I was the lucky one, because once 11 p.m. rolled around and they were establishing what was going on for the night, I went home while Nixon went down to the detail office where Sicknick collapsed, another person in need of an AED. Early the next morning, Sicknick would die.
In March of 2022, Congress ordered a plaque to be created, requiring "listing the names of all of the officers of the United States Capitol Police, the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, and other Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies and protective entities who responded to the violence that occurred at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021."
It's January 6, 2024, and there's still no plaque that commemorates Daisy and William Myers buying a home in Levittown. If a plaque ever does get made, I hope it documents the violence, yes, but I also hope it celebrates the joys the Myers found in the neighborhood. Celebrates the awe they experienced watching their children Billie, Stevie, and Lynda hit milestones growing up. I hope it documents the meals they loved and the friendships they made… I hope it tells a human story.
