Armed Capitol Hill Staffer Was in Longworth Building for Eight Minutes Before Arrest
WASHINGTON — Jeffrey Allsbrooks, the Capitol Hill staffer arrested Thursday after carrying a loaded Glock 19 9mm handgun into the Longworth House Office Building, walked the halls of the building for eight minutes before he was stopped by officers, the U.S. Capitol Police said on Friday.
The Longworth building is one of five office buildings used by the U.S. House of Representatives and is located directly south of the Capitol on Independence Avenue.
On Thursday, Allsbrooks, a logistics manager with the House Chief Administrative Office, entered the building, and shortly afterwards, at approximately 7:40 a.m., officers spotted the image of a handgun in a bag Allsbrooks had been carrying on an x-ray screen.
This morning, the department said, “after our review of the investigation and preliminary timeline we discovered it took approximately four minutes to lock the building down and then approximately eight minutes until the suspect was stopped by officers.”
Allsbrooks told the officers he forgot the gun was in the bag. He was arrested and has been charged with possession of an unregistered firearm, unlawful possession of a firearm, possession of unregistered ammunition, and possession of a large capacity ammunition feeding device.
The Capitol Police said in a release that the case remains under investigation and the department is looking into what happened before, during and after Allsbrooks’ arrest.
The arrest came a few hours before President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Capitol Hill to pay tribute to former Republican Sen.Bob Dole, who was lying in state in the Capitol rotunda.
The House Chief Administrative Office is a non-partisan office that helps congressional officers with day-to-day operations.
Since the Jan. 6, 2021 siege on the U.S. Capitol by insurrectionists loyal to former President Donald Trump, there have been a number of unsettling incidents on and around the Capitol grounds.
On April 2, a Capitol Police officer died and another was seriously injured when a man rammed a car into them at a barricade on the Senate side of the Capitol building.
According to Acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman, the man “exited the vehicle with a knife in hand” and lunged at the officers after crashing into the barrier.
The slain officer was later identified as Officer William “Billy” Evans, an 18-year veteran of the department. He was a member of the Capitol Division’s first responders unit.
In August, Floyd Ray Roseberry, of North Carolina, drove a pickup truck onto the sidewalk outside the Library of Congress and claimed he had explosives in the vehicle. The incident caused surrounding buildings to be evacuated and resulted in an hours-long standoff.
Rosenberry ultimately surrendered peacefully and is now facing a federal weapons of mass destruction charge.
Then in September, a 44-year-old California man who told U.S. Capitol Police he was “on patrol,” was arrested near the Democratic National Committee headquarters after officers discovered he had multiple knives and a machete in his truck.
Dan can be reached at [email protected] and at https://twitter.com/DanMcCue.
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