Aquilino Gonell was part of the Capitol Police team present on January 6 and the sergeant recounted how he and others were “punched, pushed, kicked, shoved, sprayed with chemical irritants and even blinded with eye-damaging lasers by a violent mob”, when testifying to the House committee. 

Gonell immigrated from the Dominican Republic and served in the US Army before joining the Capitol Police, serving there for 15 years. In his testimony, he’d recounted attackers “shouted that I, I, an Army veteran and police officer, should be executed.” 

In his letter to the select committee, Gonell said he “looked up to the United States as a land of opportunity and a place to better myself” and landed at the JFK airport in 1992. 

He became the first in his family to graduate college, join the US Army and then become a police officer, as per the letter. 

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“On July 23, 1999, the day before my 21st birthday, I raised my hand to give back to the country that gave me an opportunity to be anything I wanted”, Gonell detailed. At the time, he’d already begun basic training with the Army Reserve, he wrote in the letter.

Gonell was promoted to sergeant while in the army and toured Iraq according to his Twitter bio. As per Jan 6 committee member Jamie Raskin, Gonell said “nothing he ever saw in combat in Iraq prepared him for the insurrection”. 

In the letter, he said “When I was 25, and then a sergeant in the Army, I had deployed to Iraq for Operation Iraqi Freedom From time-to-time, I volunteered to travel on IED-infested roads to conduct supply missions for U.S. and allied military forces and local Iraqi populations. But on January 6, for the first time, I was more afraid working at the Capitol than during my entire Army deployment to Iraq. In Iraq, we expected armed violence, because we were in a war zone. But nothing in my experience in the Army, or as a law enforcement officer, prepared me for what we confronted on January 6.”

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Gonell is married and has relatives in the US, as his letter adds. They were worried for him on the day of the insurrection and tried to contact him. The Capitol Police sergeant detailed his return home after the attack in the letter to the committee, saying, “After order finally had been restored at the Capitol and after many exhausting hours, I arrived home at nearly 4:00 am on January 7. I had to push away my wife from hugging me because of all the chemicals that covered my body. I couldn’t sleep because the chemicals reactivated after I took a shower, and my skin was still burning.” 

He had been promoted to the position of Sergeant in the Capitol Police in 2018, three years prior to the insurrection.