A young veteran who served three tours of duty was forced from his Minnesota home during an early morning FBI raid. Aaron James, 38, is facing decades in prison for helping a dying woman on the U.S. Capitol steps on Jan. 6, 2021.
James said he was escorted into the Capitol by a police officer so he could be with his stepfather who had just been sprayed with mace.
“My stepfather, he was sprayed in the face with mace and he was escorted in and he was sat on one of the benches inside of the Capitol … I had seen him there and there was a large crowd that was in front of the door. It was so thick that I couldn’t push my way through, so I actually tapped on the arm of one of the Capitol police and asked the gentleman, ‘Can you please help me in here? Escort me in. My stepfather is right there.’ You can see him on that bench, and he’s been sprayed with mace. In the discovery, there is a video that shows me walking with the Capitol police officer up to my stepfather. That was my entrance into the Capitol,” James explained.
A short time later, his stepfather, Bob, and his brother, Jonah, returned to their hotel room while he and his other brother, Isaac, remained at the Capitol.
James said there were thousands of people gathered around the Capitol at this point, describing the massive crowd as a “wave just kind of pushing you along.”
“We’re up on the right side. We were pigeonholed and pushed into this area between a handrail and the wall next to the tunnel and I started hearing somebody yell, ‘Medic!’ I saw a woman who was being dragged with her stomach exposed … people started performing CPR on her. My initial reaction was to push through there and help them out with the CPR,” James commented.
“My background is as a United States Navy corpsman … so I was basically a combat medic. I was trained to be a field medic with the Marine Corps. I was attached to the 3rd Marines out of Hawaii for five years. I’ve done two combat deployments to Iraq, one to Afghanistan, then I did a joint special operations mission in the Philippines, attached to SEAL Team 5, again, as a corpsman, so as a combat medic,” he added.
He would later learn the woman was Rosanne Boyland, who died that day.
James noticed there was so much mace in the air that it looked like “a waterfall.”
“It was hitting the people who were performing the life-saving measures on Rosanne Boyland. So my thought was, how can I provide them some type of reprieve from this mace? So I picked up a shield from the ground, slapped it in my brother’s hand, pushed him out into right in front of the tunnel so he could block the mace from hitting the people who were performing CPR. I grabbed the shield from the ground myself, and there are multiple videos that show just shields being thrown around. They’re everywhere. So I actually picked one up,” James said.
As pictured, the brothers held the shields and stood there for a few minutes, James said. He then walked down to the reflecting pool, washed off his face, and returned to the hotel with his brother.
“We all got back and were hanging out as a family eating pizza and at no point did we think that we had committed felonies for doing that. At no point,” he said.
James is facing 20 years in prison, charged with nine felonies.