Ashli Babbitt was preparing for this day, the day when world events would change their path. When a dismayed friend on Twitter last week asked, “When do we start winning?” Mrs. Babbitt had an answer: “January 6, 2021.”
Your name will now be connected to that date, and to shaky images that show a crowd of rowdies breaking glass at the door leading to the Capitol speaker lobby.
In front of this crowd is the small figure of Mrs. Babbitt, wearing snow boots, jeans and a Trump flag wrapped around her neck like a cape.
“Go! Go!” she screams, and then two men hoist her to the edge of a broken window. As she pokes her head through the frame, an undercover Capitol Police officer fires a shot, and she falls back into the crowd. Blood begins to flow from your mouth.
The day after Babbitt’s death, as part of a crowd that invaded the Capitol amid the electoral college’s vote count, a portrait of her is taking shape.
Mrs. Babbitt left the Air Force after two wars and 14 years, settling near the working-class suburb of San Diego, where she was raised. Life after the military was not easy. After briefly working on the safety of a nuclear power plant, she was struggling to keep a pool supply company running.
As a civilian, she was free to express her political views. His social media feed was a torrent of messages celebrating President Trump; QAnon conspiracy theories; and taken against immigration, drugs and Democratic leaders in California.
“You refuse, you refuse to choose America over your stupid political party, I am so tired of it,” she said in a video message posted on Twitter, addressing California politicians. “You can consider yourself put on alert. Me and the American people. I’m so tired of it, I’m awake, man, this is absolutely unbelievable. “
Everyone close to Mrs. Babbitt responded with shock. Her husband, Aaron Babbitt, 39, told a Fox affiliate in San Diego that he had texted his wife about 30 minutes before the shooting, and she never responded.
Her brother, Roger Witthoeft, 32, said Babbitt did not tell the family that he was planning to go to Washington. But he was not surprised that she protested.
“My sister was 35 years old and served 14 years – for me this is most of her conscious adult life,” said Witthoeft, of Lakeside, California. “If you feel like you’ve given your country most of your life and you’re not being heard, it’s a hard pill to swallow. That’s why she was upset. “
Babbitt, who had four younger brothers, was raised in an almost apolitical family, said Witthoeft. The father worked with commercial floors and the mother in a school program. Mrs. Babbitt enlisted in the Air Force after finishing high school.
While on active duty from 2004 to 2008, she met and married her first husband, Timothy McEntee. She worked as a controller of the security forces, a job whose duties include guarding gates at Air Force bases, and was sent to Afghanistan and Iraq.
She then served on Air Force reserves and the National Air Guard. In Guarda, she was assigned to a unit based near Washington that is known as “Guardians of the Capital”, because one of her main missions is to defend the city. Squadron security forces regularly train with shields and shock clubs for what the Air Force calls “civilian disturbance missions”. It was sent twice more to the United Arab Emirates in 2012 and 2014, according to an Air Force spokeswoman.
Ms. Babbitt left the army as a relatively low-ranking senior aviator in 2016, several years before she became eligible for a pension and other benefits.
By this time, she had found another source of income, working safely at the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in Maryland. She worked there from 2015 to 2017, according to a representative from Exelon, the energy company that operates the plant.
The Presidential Transition
It was there that she met Mr. Babbitt, who has worked at the facility since 2007 and left in 2017, the representative said. The two returned to their native California. She filed for divorce from Mr. McEntee in 2018.
The transition was not entirely smooth. In 2016, Mr. Babbitt’s ex-girlfriend filed for protection in a court, telling the court that Mrs. Babbitt, then known as Ashli McEntee, approached her on a road and hit her in the back of her car. 3 times.
“She yelled at me and threatened me verbally,” says the complaint. The court granted a protection order. The following year, the ex-girlfriend again requested a protective measure, which was granted by the court.
Shortly after that, Babbitt moved to California, where he helped buy Fowlers Pool Service and Supply, a company where his brother, Witthoeft, said he had worked.
“We all work together as a family – my other youngest brother, me, her husband, me, my uncle,” said Witthoeft. “It was very good, a family affair.”
Mrs. Babbitt seemed to have difficulties in business. In 2017, she took out an expensive short-term commercial loan. In fact, this meant that her pool business would have to pay an interest rate that she later calculated in court cases at 169%.
Within days of signing the loan agreement, she stopped making payments, repaying only about $ 3,400 of the $ 65,000 borrowed from the lender, EBF Partners, the records show. The creditor soon sued her.
Babbitt’s policy was emphatically pro-Trump. At the door of the swimming pool supply company, a poster states that it is an “autonomous zone free of masks, better known as America”, where “we shake hands like men, we beat our fists like brothers”.
Leaving the army freed her to participate in politics, something she enjoyed, her brother said.
“That was one of her things – for the first time in her life, she could really say what she wanted and didn’t have to repress it,” he said. She was frustrated, he said, with the number of homeless people in San Diego and the difficulty of running a small business.
“My sister was a normal Californian,” he said. “The problems she was crazy about were the things we are all crazy about.”
Her social media reports suggest that she, too, has increasingly embraced QAnon’s conspiratorial thinking, who claimed that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by an elite Satan-worshiping cabal, and that it was up to ordinary people to reinstate Trump.
She retweeted a post that promised a violent revolt that would lead to Trump’s second inauguration.
“Nothing is going to stop us,” she wrote on Twitter the day before her death. “They can try and try and try, but the storm is here and is falling on DC in less than 24 hours…. dark to light! “
Her brother said she was in love with the Trump cause and believed he was defending the American people.
“I know it mattered a lot to her at the end of her life,” he said. “It was very important that she died for that.”
Candice Reed contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy and Jack Begg contributed research.