U.S. Capitol security protocols date back to 1998 shootings by southern Illinois native
The violent siege of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump on Wednesday has brought scrutiny upon the Capitol Police and led to the resignation of its chief.
Similar discussions about securing the nation’s seat of government took place 23 years ago, when a man who grew up near Valmeyer shot and killed two Capitol Police officers and wounded a tourist in the building. That case led officials to revamp a plan to build the Capitol Visitor Center, which helps regulate visitation by millions of people each year.
“Changes in security needs, as underscored by the tragic murder of two Capitol police officers in 1998, and other safety and accessibility considerations required revisiting and revalidating (the design report),” according to the center’s website.
The underground center opened in 2008.
It’s unclear whether security measures resulting from the 1998 shootings were still in place on Wednesday, when a mob overwhelmed Capitol Police, who knew for weeks that a demonstration was in the works and would potentially draw an angry crowd.
The siege started with a Trump rally of several thousand people who marched to the U.S. Capitol to protest the counting of Electoral College votes from the presidential election. Dozens of rioters broke into the building, battled Capitol Police and vandalized property.
One person was shot and killed by a police officer, another police officer died from his injuries and three others died as a result of medical emergencies.
“I wish we could say we couldn’t see it coming,” President-Elect Joe Biden said Thursday of the violence, pointing to Trump’s attacks on democratic institutions. “But that isn’t true. We could see it coming.”
Only one perpetrator
Circumstances of the 1998 shootings at the U.S. Capitol were vastly different. There was only one perpetrator, Russell “Rusty” Weston Jr., a 41-year-old drifter from the metro-east with a cabin in Montana.
Prosecutors said he was carrying a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver when he:
- Burst through a metal detector on July 24, 1998.
- Shot Jacob Chestnut in the back of the head “execution-style” as the police officer wrote out directions for a tourist.
- Ran down a hallway and fired on another officer.
- Ducked through a doorway and killed special agent John Gibson during a gun battle in which Weston was shot four times.
Two stray bullets hit Angela Dickerson, a 24-year-old tourist and interior designer from Virginia.
“Considering all that happened, I truly did come out the lucky one,” she said at a news conference covered in an Associated Press story. ”I only wish that there were three surviving victims instead of just me.”
Paranoid schizophrenic
Weston had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia 10 years earlier and deeply mistrusted the federal government, family members told investigators and reporters after the shootings. They lived between Valmeyer and Waterloo.
One friend recalled Weston boasting that he was a CIA agent charged with protecting President Bill Clinton from an assassination plot.
“Over a period of years, Weston wrote frequent letters to government agencies, complaining about grievances such as his belief that land mines were planted on the grounds of his Montana cabin,” according to court papers reviewed by the AP. “He once drove up to the guard hut outside CIA headquarters and delivered a rambling discourse on President Clinton, Marilyn Monroe and cloning.”
Weston was found not mentally competent to stand trial. Now 64, he’s being held at the Federal Medical Center, an all-male facility with 788 inmates in Butner, North Carolina, according to U.S. Bureau of Prisons records.
Weston’s parents, Russell Weston Sr. and Arbah Jo Weston, cooperated with authorities in the investigation, testified that their son had struggled with mental illness for 20 years and expressed sympathy for his victims. Russell Sr. died in 2008 and Arbah Jo died in 2020, according to obituaries on the Leesman Funeral Homes website.
Valmeyer Village Clerk Laurie Brown remembers the case, which brought widespread attention to the small Illinois community, even though Russell Jr. wasn’t really a resident.
“He had the ZIP code, but he didn’t live within city limits when that happened,” she said.
