Image Credit: CNN

By Jill Sperling

US CAPITOL

American living in Kamloops saddened by U.S. Capitol breach

Jan 7, 2021 | 4:27 PM

KAMLOOPS — “I was hopeful going into 2021 and I’m a little upset that I was robbed of this peaceful start of 2021.”

Lesra Martin says he is saddened by the events that unfolded in the United States Capitol Wednesday afternoon (Jan. 6).

Martin, an American citizen who now lives and practices law in Kamloops, says the breach of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. was a surreal scene.

“It was almost as if we were looking at a movie, something that was truly unreal,” Martin said. “That phrase surreal comes to mind. But then at the same time I knew, like probably many people knew, that something was going to happen before the turnover of power, and I suspected that it wasn’t going to be the typical peaceful transition of power.”

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The riot broke out as Congress met for the electoral vote count. Lawmakers were evacuated to an undisclosed location on Capitol grounds for their protection.

It’s a situation that is not completely unfamiliar to Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo MP Cathy McLeod. In 2014, a shooter entered the Centre Block Parliament building in Ottawa after killing Cpl. Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial.

“You don’t know what’s going to come barging through that door… is it a number of people with significant firearms? As we learned later, it wasn’t,” McLeod recalled. “But, certainly someone made it into the heart of our democracy and it was certainly an assault on the democracy. So, if you look at the scale of what happened in the U.S. and the purpose, which was in this case to try and stop a very important part of the presidential election process, that is a concern.”

U.S. lawmakers are calling for an investigation into law enforcement’s handling at the Capitol building.

“I’m sure they’re going to be doing a lot of reflection as we did in Canada after our sort of assault in Centre Block,” McLeod said. “We looked at what worked, what didn’t work. It’s an opportunity later to say, ‘What should we have done better?'”

Martin says he feels the lack of preparedness by Capitol police looks suspicious, noting protests relating to the Black Lives Matter movement were met with a different approach.

“I can certainly say unequivocally in my mind that had the protestors that stormed the Capitol yesterday been black, brown, people of colour, people of different cultural backgrounds, the outcomes and the violence that we would have seen would have been markedly different,” he said.

“What does it say? It says that we still have a long way to go.”