Miriam Carey, driver shot near U.S. Capitol, lived with toddler daughter in Stamford, Conn.
Law enforcement officials said the vehicle was registered to a 34-year-old mother named Miriam Carey, a dental hygienist from Stamford, Conn. They think it was Carey, with her 1-year-old daughter sitting behind her, who flattened barricades outside the White House, struck officers and then set off at high speed down Pennsylvania Avenue.
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Police had a confrontation with a woman in a black car and engaged in a brief car chase with her before shots were fired outside the U.S. Capitol on Thursday.
D.C. police confirmed that the driver was shot and killed after careening around the Capitol grounds and crashing at Second Street NE. There was no sign that she was armed, police said. Video images showed a young child, her hair in braids, being carried by an officer to the back of a patrol car.
The initial portrait of Carey that emerged suggested a person unlikely to be found at the center of such violent drama. Carey, according to public documents, friends and family members, had finished college and established a work history as a dental hygienist.
ABC News quoted Carey’s mother as saying that Carey suffered from postpartum depression after her child was born, but there was scant additional information available about psychological struggles or mental breaks she may have experienced. Miriam Carey’s sister, Amy Carey, was incredulous when a reporter told her what had happened.
“That’s impossible. She works, she holds a job,” said Amy Carey, a nurse who lives in Brooklyn. “She wouldn’t be in D.C. She was just in Connecticut two days ago. I spoke to her.”
Eric Sanders, an attorney for the Carey family, said Thursday that the family was struggling to absorb the news. He said he would release an official statement Friday. “We have to mend the family first and find out what happened in D.C.,” said Sanders, speaking outside the Brooklyn home of another one of Carey’s sisters, Valarie.
About 100 law enforcement personnel from the U.S. Secret Service, the FBI, Connecticut State Police and Stamford police searched Carey’s apartment in the Woodside Green complex in this New York City suburb overnight, removing boxes, bags and at least one computer.
The search involved hazardous material teams, a bomb squad and a robot, Stamford Police Chief Jonathan Fontneau said. Operating under the assumption that something inside the apartment might pose a threat, police sent a robot through a window first, and meticulously decontaminated people who went in and out of the unit, Fontneau said. In the end, they found just a “typical” first-floor two-bedroom apartment with “nothing out of the ordinary,” Fontneau said.
Until Thursday, the police chief said, Carey, too, “was nothing out of the ordinary that would draw attention to herself.”
As of 7 a.m. Friday, police declared the complex safe and allowed evacuated residents to return.
Police had been called to the apartment once before, in December, but not for a criminal matter, Fontneau said. He did not have further details. A neighbor who declined to give his name said the tires were stolen from Carey’s car in the late spring or early summer, and Carey was somewhat upset at apartment officials about it.
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