Qualla: 1998 United States Capitol shooting

1998 United States Capitol shooting: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit United States Capitol Police (USCP), Public domain. Officer Jacob Chestnut was 58 years old, a retired Air Force master sergeant who had served two tours in Vietnam, and he had been a Capitol Police officer for nearly half his life. He was standing at the Document Door of the United States Capitol on the afternoon of July 24, 1998, when a man came up to the metal detector and shot him in the back of the head at point-blank range. Detective John Gibson was 42, a Massachusetts native and a lifelong Boston Red Sox fan, and he was assigned to the dignitary protection detail of House Majority Whip Tom DeLay. When Gibson heard the gunfire he told the office staff to take cover under their desks. He met the shooter at the door of the office. Both men shot each other. Both later died. Their bodies became the first police officers ever to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda. Chestnut was the first African American to receive the tribute. The man who killed them was named Russell Eugene Weston Jr., and he believed he had come to Washington to save the country from disease and a cannibal invasion.

Image: United States Capitol Police (USCP) | Public domain

1998 United States Capitol shooting: Three Minutes

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit United States Capitol Police (USCP), Public domain. The attack lasted about three minutes from the first shot at the Document Door to Weston's arrest in DeLay's outer office. Officer Douglas McMillan, normally posted outside, was nearby retrieving keys to get a wheelchair for a visitor when Weston opened fire. McMillan returned fi...

Image: United States Capitol Police (USCP) | Public domain

1998 United States Capitol shooting: A Heart Surgeon at the Scene

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit United States Capitol Police (USCP), Public domain. Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, who would later become Senate Majority Leader, was a board-certified heart and lung transplant surgeon before he had been a senator. He had been presiding over the Senate floor a few minutes before the shooting and was still in the Capitol. Hearin...

Image: United States Capitol Police (USCP) | Public domain

1998 United States Capitol shooting: Lying in Honor

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit United States Capitol Police (USCP), Public domain. Two days after the shooting, on July 26, the bodies of Jacob Chestnut and John Gibson were carried into the Rotunda of the Capitol and placed on the Lincoln catafalque - the same wooden bier that had supported the bodies of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, Taft, K...

Image: United States Capitol Police (USCP) | Public domain

1998 United States Capitol shooting: The Question of Cannibals

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit United States Capitol Police (USCP), Public domain. Russell Eugene Weston Jr. grew up in Valmeyer, Illinois, a town of 900 people in the Mississippi flood plain. He graduated from Valmeyer High School in 1974 and moved to a tiny mining town called Rimini in the Montana mountains, where neighbors found him eccentric and isolated. H...

Image: United States Capitol Police (USCP) | Public domain