Her name will now be connected to that date, and to shaky footage showing a crowd of rioters smashing glass on the door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby of the Capitol.

At the front of that crowd is the small figure of Babbitt, wearing snow boots, jeans, and a Trump flag wrapped around her neck like a cape.

“Go! Go!” she shouts, and then two men hoist her up to the rim of a broken window. As she sticks her head through the frame, a Capitol Police officer in plain clothes fires a shot, and she falls back into the crowd. Blood starts pouring from her mouth.

A day after Babbitt’s death, as part of a mob storming the Capitol amid counting of Electoral College votes, a portrait of her is taking shape.

Babbitt had left the Air Force after two wars and 14 years, settling near the working-class San Diego suburb where she was raised. Life after the military was not easy. After briefly working security at a nuclear power plant, she was struggling to keep a pool-supply company afloat.

As a civilian, she found herself newly free to express her political views. Her social media feed was a torrent of messages celebrating President Trump; QAnon conspiracy theories; and tirades against immigration, drugs and Democratic leaders in California.

“You guys refuse, refuse to choose America over your stupid political party, I am so tired of it,” she said in a video message posted on Twitter, addressing California politicians. “You can consider yourself put on notice. Me and the American people. I am so tired of it, I am woke, man, this is absolutely unbelievable.”

The people close to Babbitt have all responded with shock.

Her husband, Aaron Babbitt, 39, told a Fox affiliate in San Diego that he had

sent his wife a message about 30 minutes before the shooting, and she never responded.

Her brother, Roger Witthoeft, 32, said Babbitt had not told her family that she was planning to go to Washington. But he was not surprised that she would protest.

“My sister was 35 and served 14 years — to me that’s the majority of your conscious adult life,” said Witthoeft, of Lakeside, California. “If you feel like you gave the majority of your life to your country and you’re not being listened to, that is a hard pill to swallow. That’s why she was upset.”

Babbitt, who had four younger brothers, was raised in a mostly apolitical household, Witthoeft said.

Their father worked in commercial flooring and their mother in a school programme. Babbitt enlisted in the Air Force after finishing high school.

While on active duty from 2004 to 2008, she met and married her first husband, Timothy McEntee.

She worked as an enlisted security forces controller, a job whose duties include guarding gates at Air Force bases, and was deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq.

She then served in the Air Force Reserves and the Air National Guard. In the Guard, she was assigned to a unit based near Washington that is known as the “Capital Guardians”, because one of their primary missions is defending the city.

New York Times News Service