5/16/2023 0 Comments Jamie raskin tragedy![]() It was the day when the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election would be counted. He spent a few days nearly catatonic, “rocking back and forth like a baby.” Then, on January 6, he rode down to the Capitol to try to work. “After searching frantically for my phone-which I had thrown high in the air when I came upon the scene-after dialing 911 and screaming after I tried to resuscitate him and get him to breathe by pressing repeatedly on his hard, beautiful chest…I floated through the house and under the grey winter sky, thinking perhaps I was gone forever, too,” Raskin writes in Unthinkable, his extraordinary new memoir of an extraordinary year. ![]() For Raskin and his wife and their two other children, this was the start of a nightmare. The previous Thursday, after preparing a breakfast smoothie, he had gone to the room where his 25-year-old son, Tommy, was staying while remotely attending Harvard Law School and had found him dead, a victim of suicide. Raskin, a Democrat who represents Maryland’s Eighth District, was entering his fifth year in Congress, having first been elected on the same night as Donald Trump. “They thought they were going to die,” he said.In the history of workweeks that start badly, few can compete with the one Representative Jamie Raskin began on January 6, 2021, his first full morning back in the Capitol since discovering the corpse of his son six days before. Raskin said his daughter and son-in-law were locked in a nearby office, hiding under a desk “placing what they thought were their final texts and whispered phone calls.” The most haunting sound I ever heard, and I will never forget it," he said. “And then there was a sound I will never forget, the sound of pounding on the door like a battering ram. The mob eventually breached the building, and Raskin described lawmakers on the House floor being instructed to put on gas masks. 6, Trump exhorted his followers to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” Trump's claims of fraud were repeatedly dismissed, including by Republican judges who have ruled the lawsuits lacked evidence. The most haunting sound I ever heard, and I will never forget it Rep. There was a sound I will never forget, the sound of pounding on the door like a battering ram. Of course they'd be safe, Raskin remembered responding, because "this is the Capitol.” Raskin recalled how the pair wondered if going with him would be safe given Trump had exhorted his supporters to come to Washington for a rally championing the then-president's baseless claims that he lost November's presidential election because of fraud. News4’s Chris Gordon has more on the unique tribute to keep Tommy’s legacy alive. Tommy, the son of Congressman Jamie Raskin, died by suicide on New Year’s Eve. The Takoma Park community gathered to pay tribute to Tommy Raskin with good deeds. ![]() Trump is the first president to face an impeachment trial after leaving office and the first to be twice impeached. Five people died as a result of the insurrection. Raskin, 58, a former constitutional law professor, is leading the impeachment prosecution in the Senate of former President Donald Trump, who is charged with inciting last month's siege of the Capitol to overturn the election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. “Of all the terrible, brutal things I saw and I heard on that day and since then, that one hit me the hardest." ![]() “She said, ’Dad, I don’t want to come back to the Capitol,'” Raskin said softly, squeezing his nose and shaking his head to clear away tears. Capitol on the day a deadly mob overran it.īut it was recalling what she said to him next, after he assured her nothing like that would happen again, that made Maryland Democratic Rep. The congressman’s voice cracked and he paused to drink from a bottle of water as he told of apologizing to his daughter for bringing her to the U.S. ![]()
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