America has been made to endure this pain before, when a mass shooting has desecrated its most cherished spaces: a schoolroom in Newtown; a cinema in Aurora; a church in Charleston.

This time, with the dawn, a baseball park in Virginia became, in the words of Senator Rand Paul, “a killing field”.

What politicians who trade their suits and ties for baseball uniforms lack in fitness, they make up for in earnest enthusiasm. Such is the dedication of Steve Scalise, the No 3 House Republican, and his colleagues that they regularly start practice at 6.15 or 6.30am at the Eugene Simpson Stadium Park in Alexandria, across the Potomac river from Washington DC.

This allows them to beat the heat, which was heading towards 90F(32C) on Wednesday, and the clamour of Capitol Hill.

Their surroundings are a serene, affluent area of detached redbrick houses with porches, clipped lawns and trees where trouble is hard to imagine. The baseball field is close to the park where local people walk their dogs, a children’s playground and a YMCA. It lies about halfway between Washington DC to the north and George Washington’s farm, Mount Vernon, to the south.

There were 20 House members and two senators present, according to the congressman Joe Barton of Texas, the Republican team’s manager, grabbing the last chance to hit some balls before Thursday’s annual charity game against their Democratic rivals.

Just after 7am, a man who would be identified later as James Hodgkinson, 66, from Belleville, Illinois, walked up to two congressmen, Ron DeSantis and Jeff Duncan, as they were getting into their car to leave the field, the pair recalled.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest James T Hodgkinson, the suspect in the Virginia shooting. Photograph: AP

Duncan told reporters that the man had “asked me if the team practicing was a Democrat or Republican team. I told him they were Republicans. He said, ‘OK, thanks,’ turned around.”

Minutes later, as the dedicated amateurs were nearing the end of batting practice, there was a loud bang. They stopped and stared, puzzled. Rodney Davis of Illinois said later that he thought something heavy had dropped at a construction site.

“He’s got a gun!” someone shouted. Another person yelled: “Hit the ground!”

‘He was hunting us’

One of the most vivid accounts would come from Mo Brooks, an Alabama congressman. “I was on deck, about to hit batting practice on the third-base side of home plate, and I heard a loud ‘bam’, and I look around and behind third base and the third base dugout, which is cinderblock, I see a rifle,” he told CNN. “And I see a little bit of a body and I then hear another ‘blam’ and I realise that there’s an active shooter.”

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Hodgkinson, wearing jeans and blue shirt, was wielding a rifle from behind a chain-link fence near third base. By most estimates, he would fire at least 50 rounds, the bullets kicking up earth and gravel. There was pandemonium. Brutally exposed on the open field, people variously hit the deck, dived into a dugout for cover, raced into the dog park or jumped over a fence and ran for their lives. The team manager Joe Barton’s 10-year-old son Jack hid under an SUV.

Mike Bishop of Michigan told the New York Times: “He was hunting us at that point. There was so much gunfire, you couldn’t get up and run. Pop, pop, pop, pop – it’s a sound I’ll never forget.”

Hodgkinson kept firing as he moved from near the third-base dugout towards the backstop behind home plate. He never got on to the field because the chain-link fence around the park was locked. Barton said later: “Had he gotten in the fence, it would have been a bloodbath.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A view of the baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia, after the shooting. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

The Texas congressman Roger Williams, who coaches the Republican team, added: “We were sitting ducks. We had nothing to fight back with but bats, if it came to that.”

The first victim was Scalise, 51, who had been fielding balls on second base. He was hit in the hip and collapsed to the ground, screaming. He managed to drag himself to the outfield grass, leaving a trail of blood, witnesses said later.

Two Capitol Hill police officers, Crystal Griner and David Bailey, who were in Scalise’s security detail, immediately returned fire. Senator Jeff Flake yelled: “Are you friendly? Are you friendly?”

One shouted back: “Yes!”

One of the officers suffered a gunshot wound but kept firing. Both were widely praised for saving numerous lives.

There was so much gunfire, you couldn’t get up and run. Pop, pop, pop, pop – it’s a sound I’ll never forget Congressman Mike Bishop

An Alexandria resident, Katie Fillus, told the Washington Post she saw a female officer pull out a gun and scream, “Drop your weapon!” but the gunman shot her. “She fell on the ground in front of us, and we were all just trying to lay as flat we could. And I belly-crawled, dragging through the mud. I got to the car and I ducked under the car and I laid as close as I could under the car to hide from the person. Then the police seemed to come.”

Brooks, meanwhile, had thrown himself down at home plate, but decided to take a chance and run to the first base dugout, where about a dozen congressmen and aides were lying. Among them was congressional aide Zachary Barth, who had been struck in the leg and hobbled across the field. Brooks took off his belt and another congressman applied a tourniquet to try to slow the bleeding.

“In the meantime,” Brooks told CNN, “I’m towards the right-field side of the dugout and there’s gunfire within about five, six, seven feet of my head, and I look up and there’s a guy with a gun blasting away. Fortunately, it was one of the good guys, one of our security detail, who was shooting back.

“Of course it was pistol versus rifle, our pistols versus the shooter’s rifle on the third-base line just outside the chain-link fence, and he was warning us to stay down.”

He added: “But for the Capitol police and the heroism they showed, it could very well have been a large-scale massacre. All we would have had would have been baseball bats versus a rifle. Those aren’t good odds.”

Police arrive

By 7.09am, Alexandria police had received a call reporting shots fired at the park, according to the chief, Michael Brown. Three minutes later, they arrived at the scene.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Members of the FBI response team search for evidence on the field. Photograph: UPI / Barcroft Images

Hodgkinson – a home inspector who, it was soon revealed, had volunteered for Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign – was shot at 7.14am. His rampage had lasted roughly 10 minutes.

Congressman Mike Conaway said: “The guy’s down to a handgun, he dropped his rifle, they shoot him, I go over there, they put him in handcuffs.”

It was not clear how much time passed before Hodgkinson died. The cause was multiple gunshots to the torso, according to the coroner’s report.

The coast finally clear, Brooks, Flake and others ran towards the wounded Scalise. Flake recalled: “I wanted to get to him but there were still shots going overhead from both sides. Finally, when the shooter was down, I just ran low out to Steve.”

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They put pressure on the hip wound to staunch the bleeding while Brad Wenstrup, a congressman from Ohio and a physician, checked for any other wounds.

After medical personnel arrived, Flake said, he retrieved Scalise’s mobile phone. “I got his phone and called his wife, just to make sure she didn’t hear the news before. So, fortunately, she hadn’t, and I was able to tell her that he looked to be stable and we were with him.”

A helicopter landed in the field and took five people to local hospitals with gunshot wounds: Scalise, who remains in critical condition, lobbyist Matt Mika, congressional aide Zachary Barth, a Capitol police officer and the gunman.

Brooks said: “At that time, the police were causing all of us to gather outside the first base line and the chain-link fence and cordoning off the area to help ensure if there was a second shooter we would be better protected.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The FBI special agent Tim Slater briefs the press after the attack. Photograph: Zach Gibson/Getty Images

The typically tranquil neighbourhood was stunned. Bullets had lodged in or gone through windows of the nearby YMCA. Alex Heimberg, 19, who had arrived at 6am for a morning workout, had been in the basement during the gunfire. “We didn’t really know what to think of it,” he said. “It could be weights dropping from upstairs. It’s just something we’ve never experienced but we were given context when a man came down and said there was an active shooter and we said, ‘Oh crap, we need to get somewhere safe.’”



One patron reacted casually, wrapping himself in a towel and using a sauna, Heimberg recalled. The YMCA was on lockdown for about three hours.

A show of solidarity

It soon emerged that the shooter Hodgkinson was a leftwing activist with a record of domestic violence. He had signed an online petition calling for Donald Trump to be impeached and wrote on Facebook: “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”

We’re not going to let incidents like this change our way of life or daily routines Mike Doyle, Democratic team manager

Hodgkinson’s Facebook page – later removed by the social network – also featured pictures of Senator Bernie Sanders, who said he had been informed that Hodgkinson had apparently volunteered for his presidential campaign last year. “I am sickened by this despicable act,” a shaken Sanders said on the Senate floor. “Let me be as clear as I can be: violence of any kind is unacceptable in our society, and I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms.”

The drama in Alexandria all but cancelled the day’s business at the White House and Capitol Hill. At 11.36am, Donald Trump, sombre on his 71st birthday, announced: “The assailant has now died from his injuries.” In a partisan and rancorous political climate, Trump also made a measured appeal for unity. “We are strongest when we are unified and when we work together for the common good,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bernie Sanders strongly condemned the shooting after it came out that the suspect had volunteered for his presidential campaign. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

And for a day, at least, the mood in Washington seemed to have changed. At 4pm, the managers of the Republican and Democratic congressional baseball teams appeared together at a joint press conference and vowed that the game at Nationals Park on Thursday would go on. Barton said: “It will be ‘play ball’ tomorrow night at 7.05.”

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Mike Doyle, the manager of the Democratic team, added: “We’re not going to let incidents like this change our way of life or daily routines.”

The congressmen also had another message. They believed the attack was a consequence of the increasingly toxic political climate between politicians, the press and the public.

“Members are not looked at as people any more,” Barton said, reflecting on the change since he was first elected in 1985. “People think they can come to our town hall meetings and say just the most obnoxious things and we’ll not feel anything personally.”

As a first step, Doyle said the Democrats invited Republicans to the Democratic Club for dinner. Barton ribbed him that he would order the most expensive steak on the menu. Doyle shot back: “We’re Democrats. We don’t have steaks. That’s your club.”