The 13th Step - Emelia's Thing

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

A young police officer unexpectedly finds herself back in New Hampshire, and she’s not the same person she was when she left. Something happened to her – to all of us. But for Officer Emelia Campbell, this thing still lives in her brain and her body. This is her story of survival.

Hi, it's Lauren Chuljan. I am so happy to be back in this feed, but this time I actually have something a little different for you. I've been working on a news story, not a podcast, just a single audio documentary about a really interesting person I met lately. I don't wanna give anything away other than to say

this person taught me a lot about trauma and resilience, which as you know, from listening to The 13th Step, is something I am very familiar with and also continue to be fascinated by. And so that's all I'm going to say. I can't wait to hear what you think. Here it is from the document team at New Hampshire Public Radio, Amelia's Thing. These are my moocow friends.

I say hi to them every day. I know they look cute. And there's like two horses over here. I'm sitting in the front seat of Officer Amelia Campbell's police cruiser. We're on a tour of her typical patrol route in Northumberland, New Hampshire. She showed me her preferred speed trap spots, the scene of a hit and run from last week. But this, a farm, this is the hot spot. Suddenly two horses jump up on their hind legs

and start kind of swatting at each other. Oh, hey, hey, break it up, guys. Don't make me come over there. Life as a cop in a rural town can be slow. Amelia's got a good sense of humor about it. But this job can also drive her a little nuts. She says 90% of the calls they get in Northumberland are what Amelia describes as non-police matters. Case in point. A call comes in. It's a message from police dispatch.

Amelia looks down at a computer screen that sits between us and starts reading. Yeah. So something like, we have no water and we're on the town water system. Basically, someone's water isn't working. So they called the police to fix it? So here's 28-year-old Officer Campbell, dressed in your typical police uniform, bulletproof vest, gun in a holster, and her brown hair pulled back into a bun.

She puts her hands up like she's exasperated and mouths, what do you want me to do about that? What do you want me to do about that? I can't just wave a magic wand and be like, let there be water. I was like, you might want to call the water department. Just give me one second.

Now, before you start thinking that Amelia is just going to shrug this woman off, she picks up her phone. Are you going to call this person? Uh, yeah. And then I'll probably call the water department just to see. Well, that's nice of you, Amelia. I know. I try. Don't tell anyone I'm a nice person.

I won't. I will, actually. Hi, this is Officer Campbell with Northumberland PD. Amelia Campbell is a very nice person. She can be crass, but also very sweet. She may grumble, she will definitely joke, but she is truly devoted to protecting and serving the people of Northumberland and Grovedon, New Hampshire. So consider the case of why isn't this woman's water on officially open?

Yeah, some days are better than others. I mean, there's, there's times I just deal with these calls every day. And I'm just like, why am I still in this? You know, um, cause it's, it's really not what I want to be doing. Um, I want to save lives and I want to protect people. There's days up here where I'm just like, I ain't, I ain't doing that. You know, I'm, I feel like I'm keeping two neighbors from just letting them yell at each other for 30 minutes. So why are you here?

Pays my bills. I like my chief. And I still have a lot that I need to work on emotionally. A lot she needs to work on emotionally. This question I'm asking Amelia is kind of a loaded one. Amelia is here because of January 6th. Amelia was a Capitol Police officer. Nearly four years later, January 6th still lives in her brain and in her body. Amelia is all the way up here with the horses and cows in Northumberland

because she's trying to heal. Civil dispute calls, you know, just people not getting along with each other, neighbors not getting along with each other. And just that confrontation of them fighting and yelling at each other, that just brings the flashbacks of this guy yelling at me. We want those fucking traitors. And that just kind of those emotions and that confrontation of people and, you know, those heated arguments are what kind of bring back those images for me.

those images for me. The next presidential election is just days away, and the results will be certified again on January 6th, 2025. Who knows what might happen this time? This country can't even agree on what happened last time. Was it a day of love as former President Donald Trump calls it? Or was it an attack on our democracy? I found a poll from earlier this year that said 43% of the people surveyed feel that too much is being made of January 6th. It's time to move on from it, they said. Move on? What a luxury that would be for people like Amelia Campbell.

People died that day. Many, many more were injured. And there's a silent impact of this day that we'll never get an accounting for. At least five police officers who responded to the attack on the Capitol died by suicide. It's impossible to know how many people on the Hill that day now navigate life with PTSD like Amelia does. Amelia has never spoken publicly about January 6th, but lately she's changed her mind. She's decided she wants you to know what happened, how it's not a political thing for her, it's a scar. Something that lives inside her every single day. And despite it all, she survived.

To really understand Amelia's experience of January 6th and life afterward, you have to know that up until the moment that riot began, this girl was fully thriving. It was ironically, I think for everyone else that was miserable in 2020. It was my favorite year, 2020. Not many people, she realizes, would say that. But even amidst a pandemic, Amelia was living her dream life. She grew up mostly in Loudoun, New Hampshire, a place she was dying to move away from. All we had was cow tipping at NASCAR in Loudoun. And I didn't really partake in either of them.

So it was a lot. In high school, Amelia set two big goals for herself. I want to live in Washington, DC, and I want to work in law enforcement. And by 2020, Amelia, at 24 years old, she had checked both those boxes. She was a Capitol police officer,

her first job out of college. She had recently moved in with her boyfriend, Rob, also a Capitol police officer, and she was happy. Settled. Amelia's assignment was the First Responders Unit, or FRU. It was her job to protect the outside of the Capitol building. This seems like a good time for me to tell you Amelia hates politics. She has absolutely no interest in it. Never has. Some of her colleagues loved the access to congressmen and women. Others, she says, took the job because they wanted to protect democracy. But Amelia is motivated by rules, the

literal enforcement of laws. Why is it important to protect the Capitol? It was my job. Yeah, I mean there's there's people in there that have lives and have families just like you and me, and it was my job to protect them and make sure that they go home and can do their job at the end of the day. None of our place is to say what they're doing is wrong or right. I have no idea what they're voting on 99% of the time. So I'll have added to them. She feels the same about protesters, have added to them. And in 2020, there were a lot of protests for Amelia and her colleagues to manage.

There were the weekly Fire Drill Fridays, led by Jane Fonda and other climate activists. Those were easy. Amelia says the activists would file a permit and even gave Capitol police a heads up about when they planned to block traffic or how many people would get arrested. And of course, there were the George Floyd protests. Those days Amelia remembers as more heated.

She was spit on. People cursed and screamed in her face. It sure wasn't fun, she says, but it was her job. I get it. You know, like people were angry and people need to voice their opinions and they want to be heard. And that's what our country and our democracy is all about, you know, that freedom of speech, of being heard and being listened to.

So up until, it sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong here, it sounds like up until January 6th, you really hadn't had some sort of like traumatic or even like your feelings hadn't even been hurt at work. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Do you want to talk about that day now? Yeah, we can.

Okay. And if you want to stop, we are cool to stop. So we knew, I mean, obviously, like, Biden had won the presidency and then, you know, Trump was, I don't, I mean, I don't listen to the, I don't watch the news, but I knew obviously, like, he wasn't happy with the results. And, you know, it was, it was brewing. So my original shift was 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. That's when I worked. I had come in early that day. So ironic. Amelia didn't usually come in early, but she had a little arrangement going with a colleague she liked named Officer Brian Sicknick. Brian didn't always like working overtime or holidays,

but Amelia liked the extra money, so she'd cover for him. On January 6th, Brian was scheduled to come in four hours early at 11 a.m., but Amelia offered to take it, letting Brian start his day later on. What's an extra four hours? My first two hours were on the east side, and the crowd was growing and we were like this is a pretty big crowd you know but they were being normal for for what it was. We kind of like protests because it gives you a time that it's pulling officers from everywhere so people that you don't normally see every day you can be like hey how you do you know and like check in on one another so it was it was very

just happy-go-lucky for us it was it in on one another. So it was, it was very just happy go lucky. For us, it was really even up until the point, it was very normal. A few hours into her shift, things were still just happy go lucky. Amelia pops inside the Capitol, heads downstairs to the house cafeteria to grab a sandwich. She checks the time, realizes she's due outside. So she heads back up to the west front of the Capitol. And so I go up and we see, we like look out on Pennsylvania Avenue and we see the group coming. And I was like, holy sh— that's a lot of people. The Capitol was blocked off even more than usual because the stage was being built for

soon-to-be-President Joe Biden's inauguration. We had the bike racks up and it was barricaded like it normally was for a thing. And then I don't know if something came over the radio and it just flipped. Intel 1B advice, you got a group of about 50 are charging up the hill on the west front just north of the stairs. They're approaching the wall now. And as soon as they hit the grass on the west front of the Capitol,

they just started running. And I've never seen anything like it. Like, they're just full-fledged running towards us. Like, one minute the west front was empty and now it's completely covered in people. It's our house! There's always people that kind of like push the bike racks and we push them back and we say, no, you know, don't cross the bike rack, you know, like we were doing our thing.

And for me, it was this guy just went in, there was a ladder that was right by the scaffolding and he like went to take the ladder. And I was like, what the fuck are you doing? And I grabbed the ladder, and then the other officer came and we took control of the ladder and I kind of like flung it up the stairs. And I was like, what the fuck?

And then it was just, and then all of a sudden it was just chaos. There was like absolute chaos. And it was, there was officers everywhere. It was like absolute chaos in a way. There was officers everywhere and then, you know, officers were spraying OC spray at them and it was just getting in the air and then they were spraying shit back and it was in the air. OC spray is pepper spray.

Officers were trying to use it to hold their line, but rioters were spraying stuff back at them. And Amelia says she and her colleagues were not prepared to manage it. So at like, at one point I got sprayed with like OC spray or something and we had nothing set up. So I was looking around, I was like, who has a water bottle? You know, I have to get this out of my eyes.

Amelia finds some random Yeti water bottle on the ground and starts flushing out her eyes with it. It just burns and you can't, your influx is to like close your eyes, which really you can't do because then you're really getting it, you have to like air it out, you have to get it out of your eyes. So like, you know, crying and blinking and you know, your nose is running. Once she's able to see clearly, Amelia happens to glance down at her smartwatch, and she sees tons of notifications from her family group text.

My aunt at one point was like, are you watching this? And then my sister was like, is she okay? I remember being on the stairs, I was helping with the OC spray on somebody and I had just doused her eyes and I looked up and I just, I kind of had that I looked up and I just I kind of had that free moment and I knew I was like this is going to be the only time to say something. And I found my mom's name and I texted her I'm okay.

Was that true? No, no I mean I had just been OC sprayed and. sprayed and, you know, they were—I thought I was going to die. I did not think—at the beginning of it all, I did not think I was going to live through that day. I just, Amelia snaps back to attention. She starts thinking, quickly. She's not wearing any riot gear. She's just in her normal uniform, no shield or helmet or ballistic vest. So at one point I was like, well, what can I do where I'm going to keep myself safe?

I eventually pivoted. I don't know at what moment, but I was like, I will get injured officers. She spotted a Capitol police officer lying on the ground clearly hurt. So she runs into the crowd, put her arms around his shoulders and dragged him inside the Capitol. She remembers there's an office inside with a first aid station, a place that would be safe. So I pulled that first guy. I went back. There was an officer who was like three months pregnant, pulled her off the line. You know, I was like, you need to go check it.

You know, take care of your baby. You need to get checked out. And then I was going back out like a, I don't even want to put a number. I don't even know how many times I went in and out. But anyways, one of my coworkers got pulled into the crowd. And so we went after him and whatnot and pulled them back and his eye was cut open, like just completely bleeding. What was it like to see that?

It was rough. I brought him inside and I had my armor wrapped around him because he was like, you know, delirious and whatnot. And around that time, I said, we need to get an ambulance here. And we got the first calls that they had broken through the barricade on the east side of the Capitol. Everyone and everything had to be moved immediately. Amelia had no idea how many rioters had broken through or even where they were.

She just had to get these injured officers to safety. We had to pack up everything and we had, you know, officers that were like, you know, with broken ankles and a woman with a baby in her belly and, you know, we had to pick all that up. As they start moving through the corridors of the Capitol, Amelia says she starts to lose track of time. I lost track of everything. I mean I couldn't have even told you what side of, I didn't know if we were on the Senate side, if we were on the House side, I didn't even know if we were still at the Capitol. Like I had no idea.

They end up in a room somewhere that's deemed safe. Someone locks the door. Amelia is stuck inside with all the injured officers. Hours go by. And, you know, the, my partner, I called him my partner, I have no idea. I mean, I know his name is Michael. He worked for Metropolitan PD. So I had never met him up until this day, but he was the one with the eye injury. He was like, Campbell, we have to go back out there.

We have to go back out there. And I was like, we can't. I was like, we can't do anything. By seven, eight o'clock at night, we got the radio that had been cleared and that the building was deemed safe. Then we had a sergeant come in and he was talking and it was all like, it was just so hazy. But I remember him talking to people and writing down names. And I realize now, looking back, that he needed to figure out who was injured, who needed an ambulance, all that kind of stuff.

He came over to me and he said, How are you feeling? And I was like, I'm I'm worried about him. Him meaning Michael, the officer with the eye injury. He finally got into an ambulance. And so once he left, that was my moment that I could, I was like, okay, I was like, my partner is getting the help that he needs, the, you know, people, the protesters are out of the building. And then like, all of a sudden, that's pretty amazing how your body works. My hand started That's pretty amazing how your body works. My hand started burning.

I've never felt a worse burn in my entire life. And I looked down and it was like red and like there was a bubble like my skin had like bubbled up. So I went over to the sink and like poured, you know, put the cold water on and I was just running my hand through it. And somebody came over to me and was like, oh, just made like an audible like, and they're like, what happened? I was like, I don't know. I was like, I have no idea. I was like, I didn't even notice until 20 seconds ago.

She'd been so focused on helping, surviving. She didn't even realize she'd been hurt. Eventually, Amelia and a few other officers are taken out of the Capitol and into an ambulance. She spends hours at the hospital with many of her colleagues. She's treated, and eventually someone comes and starts taking them back to the Capitol. And I'll just never forget, it was about five, six o'clock the next morning.

We got the ride back from the hospital to the Capitol building. We were walking through the Capitol and just the destruction. It was cloudy inside from the smoke and the spray. We were just walking down the hall and we were seeing broken glass and depre and somebody's shoe like that they lost. I mean just and you could just sense the the emotion in the air and you can sense that you know we had all just gone through something that none of us really knew what had just happened. And what had just happened and yeah, it was.

You can see it in your head. Yeah, it was crazy. Amelia starts tearing up. She relives this day in her head all the time, but it usually stays in there. She hardly ever talks about it, especially this next part. As she walks through the haze, she spots a group of officers. They were like sitting on the bench outside of our, you know, just kind of slumped over to feed. We were just all defeated mentally, physically, emotionally. And I heard about

I heard about Brian Sicknick. Brian Sicknick, the Capitol police officer who Amelia always covered for, who she covered for on January 6th. Brian had collapsed at the Capitol. Another officer tried to give CPR, but it wasn't looking good. Brian was taken to the hospital

and was currently on life support. Amelia was exhausted, defeated, badly burned, and now incredibly worried. It was mid-morning now, on January 7th. January 6th was over. Except it had only just begun. Thanks for watching! United States Capitol Police Officer Amelia Campbell is gutted. She sits down on her couch in the apartment she shares with her boyfriend Rob, also a Capitol Police officer. It's about 10 a.m. on January 7th. She's finally home, 24 hours after she started her shift on January 6th. Amelia is glued to a group text she has going

with other officers. She is desperate to hear what's going on with Brian Sicknick, the colleague Amelia always covers for, who is in critical condition. It's hard for her to text back, though. Her hand is wrapped up tightly. Doctors don't know what she was sprayed with, some kind of homemade chemical. It burned through her skin and damaged her nerve endings. The doctors at the hospital told her she's got to stay home. No work for a few days.

Amelia is not having it. I absolutely hated it. And I kept texting like my inspector and whatnot. I was like, I don't want to be here. I need hated it. And I kept texting my inspector and whatnot. I was like, I don't want to be here. I need to be there with you guys. Like, there's so much happening and so much that needs to get done and cleaned up. If she's home, she can't help.

And if she's not helping, she has to sit and face whatever the hell just happened. Later that night, the group text with her colleagues lights up. There's news about Brian Sicknick. We got word that they took him off support and that he had passed away. And that was rough for me. Amelia pauses. Her face clouds over. I mean, I don't even know what he faced when he came in for a normal shift or what that looked like.

So if he was in the position that I was in during that, I made it out. You know, like, so it's just kind of that, those emotions, you know, the what ifs really like took over for me. And just a lot of anger. And there was anger about what? Just that these people had killed somebody. Over what? You know, because this, you were mad

that this guy didn't become president when you wanted him to? Like, who are you? I mean, I'm all for freedom of speech, I'm all for voicing opinions, but who are you to decide who lives and who dies? And why is it fair that this guy that was just doing his job, you know, got killed. Months after Brian died, the DC medical examiner determined he had multiple strokes hours after the battle was over. So the technical determination was he died from natural causes, but the medical examiner also said the riot, quote, played a role. Amelia lasted less than 24 hours at home.

She had to go back to the Capitol. Doctors orders be damned. I mean, by the time I think I ended up saying, fuck it to the hospital, I went in after that second day. I think by the, I took the seventh off and I literally went in the next day on the eighth. Amelia is able to talk about all this now, but back then talking about her feelings was impossible,

not an option. And when she'd run into her colleagues, it's not like they'd open up either. They just talked about what they saw, the ways they fought the rioters off. And that just made Amelia feel worse. You wanted to be like in the thick of it. You wanted to, you know, so like for me,

that was another issue I had with the processing of it was that I was kind of, at the very beginning, yes, I was fighting them and I was, but then I kind of, I got very fortunate in the fact that I was just helping the wounded and I wasn't in too many of the thick of it battles. Which is good because it meant she was safe, alive. But during all those hours she spent locked in that room,

who else could she have helped? Could I have saved somebody? Could I have, you know, there's like, I just felt kind of wimpy. You know, not that, you know, I didn't go and hide in any means. And I was like, I want, you know, like some, you naturally have a fight or flight and minus fight a hundred.

I mean, I am not a flighter. But in some of the, you know, where people were and what they did, mine kind of sounded like, you know, I. Amelia trails off. She knows this is not a healthy place to let her mind go. The idea that everyone else was brave and fought and she hid, a flighter. She now gets that's not what happened, that it's not her fault. But that's the Amelia of now. In January 2021, she was consumed with guilt.

We were all dealing with our problems. Mine were no better than anybody else's. And I just figured, you know, in the process of thinking about what everyone else did, I was sure that somebody had bigger trauma than what I had gone through. All these pent-up feelings eventually found a target. Her boyfriend, Rob. Because Rob's usual shift at the Capitol started at midnight. So Rob's schedule was to sleep through the day and work through the night, which means nothing in his world had changed because through

January 6th he was still sleeping. He had no idea that anything had happened until he just normally woke up from his alarm clock and saw the news alerts. And so when you're going through something, you need somebody to blame. I blamed him. I was so mad that I got hurt, that we had officers hurt, that I had gone through this traumatic event and he just fucking slept. It's in this traumatized, angry, isolated state that Amelia throws herself back into work. And in the days following January 6th, the bosses at Capitol Police decide that everyone will work 12 hour shifts,

six days a week. They offered hotel rooms downtown closer to the Capitol, and Amelia took one. For the next few months, Amelia's life was as follows. Wake up, ignore feelings, dress burn on hand, walk to Capitol, work 12 hours, walk home, eat a little, drink a lot, sleep, wake up, do it again. She was wound so tight that if you poked her with a pin she would have exploded. Vince Carrog first spotted Amelia in the Capitol Police break room. It was a temporary

space that had been set up at the Capitol with coffee and a bunch of donated food. Vince was in town from Texas. He's a police officer, but he was in D.C. as part of the Wounded Blue, a peer support group made up of officers from all around the country. Their main goal is to help law enforcement officers cope with injuries and trauma. This moment, Vince noticing Amelia is an important one. It would be one of two really important breakthroughs for Amelia's mental health. Vince was sitting with another guy, a colleague of his, and he remembers Amelia walking into the break room because she was apparently impossible to miss. She was, you know, in her winter gear, she was wearing a beanie, arms crossed, and you

could feel the tension emanating off of her. And she went walking past, and me and the other guy looked at each other and went, wow, we got to talk to her. No one had seen anything like January 6th. on. No one had seen anything like January 6th. But Vince says this violence was especially shocking to Capitol Police officers. Their days aren't usually filled with the typical nastiness, he calls it, of being a local cop or a state trooper. They're not dealing with murder or child abuse, active shooters on the regular.

So Vince was on the lookout for Capitol police officers who really needed support. He sees that Amelia's arms are covered in tattoos, brightly colored flowers, a big compass down her forearms. Great, he thinks, an easy way to start conversation. And she'll be easy to track down. The next day around lunchtime, here she comes again. I mean, just same, you know, scowl in her face, just not a happy camper. And I went, here we go. There's my opportunity. So she had gotten her food and she was, she had sat down and I grabbed another cup of coffee and I walked over and I went, Hey, how you down and I grabbed another cup of coffee. I walked over and I went, hey, how you doing?

And she's kind of looked up and being grunted. Vince tries asking about Amelia's tattoos. He mentions his dog, a Rottweiler, shows her pictures. He would not leave me alone. I walked out to the barricade, which was my next post, and he just stood outside the door. And I was like, dude, I'm good. And he's like, you're not good. He's like, but I will wait here until you decide to talk to me. And I was like, well, you're going to be waiting a long freaking time. Vince, it turns out, does not mind waiting. He keeps chipping away at her.

Vince, it turns out, does not mind waiting. He keeps chipping away at her. And finally they sit down and they talk. Vince asks Amelia, when's the last time you had a day off? I haven't, she says. A good night's sleep? Nope. And I leaned into it. I said, are you doing anything you probably shouldn't be doing right now?

And she lowered her head and she got a little teary and she shook her head in the affirmative. And I said, you know, like, you drinking too much when you're off? And she shook her head a little bit more and said, why don't we go have a talk? Vince takes Amelia into a private room. And that's where he's really able to get through to her, the first and only person who gets her to open up. Yeah, at one point she just completely broke down. I just, you know, all I could do is stand there and hold her and let her cry for probably

10 minutes straight. Vince understands trauma. He knows how the violence changed Amelia's brain. So he gives her some coping strategies that might sound basic, but they are essential building blocks toward healing. You know, separate yourself from the job, even if that is a day off, just enjoy being you. Stop drinking, you know, not forever, but for right now. And it's okay to talk about these things and oh yeah, you gotta eat, you gotta rest, and you've gotta exercise.

You gotta keep your body healthy because a healthy body leads to a healthy mind. Amelia couldn't take all of Vince's advice. because a healthy body leads to a healthy mind. January 6th and the aftermath. But on one of her walks to the hotel after work, Amelia had a second breakthrough, another coping mechanism, basic yet profound. And this one came from within. There was one point where I was very low in life. And I would call my sister up, and I asked to speak to my niece. Amelia is one of five Campbell siblings. Her younger sister, Ada Carruth, lived in New

Hampshire with her fiance and four-year-old Topanga. Ada and Amelia were close. Ada calls Amelia M or Emmy. But Ada says this was kind of an odd request. Topanga and Amelia had never talked on the phone. Amelia, by her own admission, actually hates children. She finds them so annoying. So Ada was not sure what to expect. The first phone call, I was like, how is this gonna go? Ada hadn't told Topanga anything about January 6th.

She didn't want her daughter to know how scared her mom was, how she worried her big sister had died. Ada wanted to protect her daughter, but she also wanted to help her sister. So she handed Topanga the phone. She got on the phone and Topanga was like, Hi, Aunty M. She called her Aunty M, O-N-N-E, and then M, Aunty M. So she's like, hi, Onnie M, you know, and M's like, how's your day? And that's basically how the conversation started. What did they talk about? Oh gosh, favorite animal color, day, food,

what you eat today, what you do with mom today. You know, dad made her brush her teeth, and he's a horrible person and you know, it's just normal kind of kid stuff. But it was, it was always just what I needed. And so every night, 7 p.m. Spengler goes to bed at 730. Every night, 7 p.m. She was on the phone with Em. These conversations never strayed into Amelia's trauma.

But having this new routine, being distracted by the little things that made life important, they had a powerful effect on Amelia. It punctured a hole in the darkness. Wake up, work 12 hours, call Topanga, realize there's a world outside the capital. Remember how to interact with civilians, people who love you. Feel a little relief and do it again. She kind of just kept me from, honestly kept me from being suicidal.

A reminder, if you need support, call or text 988 for the suicide and crisis lifeline. That's 988. Hearing this admission from Amelia made me realize how far the ripple effects of January 6th can truly go. It touched everyone in Amelia's life, even if they were too young to realize it. Ada calls January 6, Emmy's thing, because in their family, that's what it is, a traumatic thing that happened to their sister, their daughter, that affected the entire Campbell family.

Emmy wasn't quite honest with the impact that Panga was making until after, like much later, after the phone calls had ended. And I just kind of sat there and I was just like, wow, I'm glad you have that person. You know, I'm glad you, you know, and a part of me wishes it was me. Like I wish I could have been that person for her to help her through that, but I wasn't. And that's okay, that's okay.

Cause she needed somebody and Topanga was not somebody. These two bright spots, Topanga and Vince, they helped carry Amelia through the next four months of 12-hour shifts. Even after Vince goes home to Texas, he keeps calling for texting her, sometimes just saying, hey, how you doing? But it helped, especially since work never got easier. On January 9th, Capitol Police Officer Howie Liebingood died by suicide. A Metropolitan Police Officer, Jeffrey Smith, also died by suicide after the attack. And then, just months later, in April, a man drove his car into two Capitol Police officers, injuring one and killing the other.

Officer Billy Evans, who worked in the First Responders Unit, Amelia's team. It's just another new traumatic event that we all had to go through. And I wasn't as close with Evans as I was with Brian, but I had worked with him multiple times and it was just another person that I knew that I had worked with that was killed. Then I just couldn't process it. I had no time. I was like, we don't have any days off. I was like, we have no time.

We have no energy. I have no way to process any of this. And it just all kind of came flooding back. I remember being on post and looking at my phone, going into a calendar, I think I did like 16 days and on my break I went down and I put in my two weeks notice and I was done. I never said it was because I just couldn't mentally handle it anymore, or emotionally handling because I don't want anyone ever thinking that I was weak. Amelia's boss later told her there was a mass exodus of officers after she quit.

In fact, 20% of Capitol police officers quit after January 6th. Amelia packs up and heads home to New Hampshire. She leaves her dream life and her boyfriend in DC. Rob and Emilia definitely broke up, by the way. She says it likely would have been their fate anyway, but January 6th did not help. Over the next year or so, Emilia bounces around. A friend's house, then Ada's house, then her parents. She tries an old security job at an outdoor concert venue, but she can't handle the crowds. When people cheer, she collapses to the ground. She was constantly on high alert. Anything could set her off. Here's how Ada describes Amelia back then. She was like a, like a firework.

You know when you light a firework and then you have like that 10 seconds to run away and it lights up? She was like that. So I could say good morning to her in the morning and be like, hi, and she'd be in this fantastic mood. I could turn around with a glass of milk. Why are you giving me milk? Why isn't it coffee?

I want coffee. Okay, I'll get you coffee." Like, it could be so instant. We were always kind of on edge, but I don't blame her. It wasn't her fault, you know? It wasn't her fault. Slowly, Amelia will come to understand that. Therapy was a big help. Vince set her up with a trauma therapist in New Hampshire,

and it took a while. Amelia didn't say much in the first few sessions, but she kept showing up, and her therapist kept asking things. I was like, oh, she's trying so hard. I was like, maybe I'll start talking. It was kind of like that subconscious, like, and then I just,

I finally opened up a little bit and it just started feeling good and I would open up a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. But Amelia thinks the biggest impact on her mental health was Scotty. Hey baby, hey baby. Scotty is a very high energy, very fluffy, Pomski, a Pomeranian and Husky mix. Hi. Hi. You ready to go out? Oh, okay. This is from a video Amelia texted to me to show me how amp Scotty is when she gets home.

Vince brought Scotty and Amelia together. He hooked Amelia up with a nonprofit that gives trained emotional support animals to first responders. Amelia brought Scotty home just over a year after January 6th, and her life immediately improved. Scotty is specifically trained in crowd control. So when they're out in public,

he circles around Amelia and pushes people away. He even helps Amelia sleep. She sometimes has night terrors and when she's in the throes of one, Scotty is trained to wake her up. He turns on the lights and if that doesn't work, he jumps on her chest until she gets up. Amelia wasn't back to her old self. She doesn't think she'll ever be that person again. But she was better. I was moving on, you know, and so it was kind of just being easier to to realize that all these things were kind of falling into place of of my life and where I'm at now and and what I need to do to cope with it. Hey, I hate to bother you.

Do you know if they're working on anything on Lancaster Road for the water? Back in Northumberland, Amelia is still on the case of why isn't this woman's water on? She's sticking her head out the window of her cruiser, talking to a town employee who seems annoyed that Officer Campbell is interrupting his landscaping duties. It is wild to see Amelia take on this very non-police matter knowing how her law enforcement career started. Northumberland is an entirely other planet

from Capitol Hill. It's honestly stunning just to see Amelia in uniform, knowing she's constantly fighting off the remnants of January 6th, the chemical burn on her hand still bothers her, and at any moment a call could come in that takes her right back to that day. She returned to law enforcement in December of 2022, and Ada, Amelia's sister, she has a lot of thoughts about this.

I read some of the transcript of my interview with Ada as Amelia drove around. So I asked Ada, what do you think about Amelia being a cop? And she said, I thought it was real stupid. What is she fricking doing? I'm sorry, Em. She says in the recording so many times, Amelia, she says, I'm sorry, Em, but I think that's the stupidest thing.

She's back in the field that caused this PTSD. There's so many other jobs she could do so well. It's so stupid to put yourself in a vulnerable position. Why would you put yourself in a position to have something bad happening to you again? Yeah, she's not wrong. I think, cause right now at the end of the day, it's the only thing I know how to do and I think I do it well.

So no, I mean, I have that conflict with certain calls that come through at certain times and you know, I think about that. Amelia's PTSD, depression, and anxiety, they're not going anywhere. But Amelia says she knows how to take better care of herself. Having a quieter police gig is actually kind of helpful. She visits her Moocow friends when her anxiety is high.

The calls, though annoying, aren't as violent. And she needs the experience because Amelia has a new dream job. Amelia wants to start her own nonprofit where local police departments hire her to come in and create mental health support programs for their officers. Over the past few years,

Amelia has spent any spare brain space that she has on this goal. She got a master's degree in forensic psychology, and now she's applying for PhD programs. Why do you want to do that? Because I almost died. I mean, I don't think had I not had the friends that I made after, if I hadn't been talking to Vince, if I didn't have the family that I had, I wouldn't be here today. I know I wouldn't. So that's huge for me to, you know, when you kind of go through something, you know that your life is worth living. And why are you still here?

And I think this is my purpose, is to make sure that others know that they need to be here too. And to help them through that, to know that they're not alone. It's okay to cry, Amelia. Nah, I'm in a cruiser. That would look terrible. If you've been wondering how Amelia feels about the election next week, you might be surprised to hear that she is pretty unfazed by it. Some of her former Capitol Police officer colleagues

are very involved in the election, campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris even. But that's not Amelia's style. The girl hates politics. I asked her about the election and about the rioters themselves many times. The people who the federal government has now charged with harming her,

they're people who former President Donald Trump has called patriots. In the first few months of 2021, Amelia says, she was definitely mad at Trump. She says he acted childish, like a toddler. He was supposed to be the person that we look up to, she told me. Instead, his supporters were brainwashed, she says, into conducting violence on his behalf. But she's moved on from that anger. She's not mad at Trump anymore. And her feelings about the rioters themselves are more nuanced. She is forever a Capitol police officer, a person whose job it was to protect our freedom of speech. There are

plenty of people, she says, who did not break any laws that day, who were just there to voice their opinion. But for the rioters who climbed the walls, stormed the Capitol, stole things, broke things, wanted to hang Vice President Mike Pence, and hurt Amelia's friends, she wants those people to take responsibility.

And it bothers her that so many people still aren't, even to this day. Officer Campbell. We're nearing the end of our ride along through Northumberland and Grovedon. And suddenly Amelia's phone lights up. It's the woman without the water. Well perfect. You actually may, I just got in contact with the water department so they may be knocking on your door just so you know because I told them about your situation and they were going to come check it out. But I'm glad to hear that it's back and I would fire that plumber.

But I'm glad to hear that it's back and I would fire that plumber. A break in the case. The water is back on. Amelia breaks out into a huge smile. If you ever have any comments, questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to call, okay? All right. Have a great day. Bye. Bye.

And another crime solved in Grosvenor. All right, have a great day. Bye. And another crime solved in Grosvenor. You've got to love it when that happens. This story was reported and written by me, Lauren Shulgin. Jason Moon produced and mixed this piece and composed all the music. Katie Colanari is our editor. Additional editing by Dan Berrick, Todd Bookman, Taylor Quimby, and Kate Dario. The audio you heard from January 6th was sourced from videos posted by Capitol rioters and protesters on social media and then later published by ProPublica.

The audio of the police radio traffic that day came from a congressional hearing. Photography by John Tully and podcast artwork by Sarah Plord. NHPR's news director is Dan Barak. Our director of podcast is Rebecca Lavoie. Amelia's Thing is a production of The Document Team at New Hampshire Public Radio.