The two soldiers were in Washington as part of a controversial federalized National Guard deployment that President Donald Trump had ordered in August 2025, citing a crime emergency in the District of Columbia. Several hundred troops from West Virginia and other states were posted on patrol in the federal core, often at high-visibility intersections near the White House and the Mall. The deployment had been challenged in federal court. A District Court judge had ruled it unlawful just a week before the shooting; the ruling was stayed pending an appeal that would not be heard until December 11. Beckstrom and Wolfe were assigned to a sentry post at one of the corners that anchored that visibility. They were armed but they were not expecting an attack. Most of the daily traffic past their position was federal employees coming and going from the Farragut West Metro station. The shooter walked among them, indistinguishable, until he was within a few feet of the soldiers and drew his revolver.

Sarah Beckstrom had grown up in West Virginia and enlisted in the National Guard in June 2023. She was 20 years old when she died. After high school she had lived in Summersville, a town of about 3,000 people in the central Appalachians of Nicholas County, where she worked and trained between Guard duties. Her family described her as having a heart of gold. On November 27, less than 24 hours after she was shot, she died at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. Her body was carried in a procession through Washington that evening; Guard members and local law enforcement lined the streets. On November 29 the town of Summersville held a candlelight vigil. On December 10 she was buried at the West Virginia National Cemetery in Grafton in a private funeral. Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, the other soldier shot, was a graduate of Musselman High School in Inwood, West Virginia, and had been in the National Guard since February 2019. He survived the head wound and was breathing on his own and standing without assistance by December 13. He has been moved to physical rehabilitation.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal was 29 years old, Pashtun, from Khost Province in eastern Afghanistan. Until the Taliban took Kabul in August 2021, he had worked for one of the CIA's most controversial Afghan partner forces - Unit 03, also known as the Kandahar Strike Force, part of the larger network of Zero Units run out of the Afghan National Directorate of Security. The Zero Units were paramilitary teams trained, equipped, and operationally directed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Their specialty was nighttime raids on suspected Taliban members. Reporting by The Intercept and other outlets had documented cases of civilian deaths, including children, in their operations. They were sometimes called death squads in the international press. When the Taliban took over in 2021, men who had worked for these units faced execution if captured. Lakanwal was airlifted out as part of Operation Allies Welcome, the U.S. effort to evacuate Afghans who had aided American forces. He was resettled in Bellingham, Washington, with his wife and five children. He applied for asylum in 2024. His asylum was granted in April 2025, under the Trump administration that had taken office that January. A friend told reporters after the shooting that Lakanwal had suffered from mental health issues and was disturbed by the casualties his unit had caused in Afghanistan. He has been charged with first-degree murder and is being held without bond.

The Trump administration responded to the shooting within hours by requesting an additional 500 National Guard troops for Washington. The same evening the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that all immigration applications for Afghan nationals were suspended indefinitely pending a review of vetting procedures, and that all green cards from 19 countries of concern would be reexamined. Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama called for the deportation of every single Islamist who is living among us just waiting to attack. Donald Trump Jr. and others suggested the administration would suspend migration from what the President called Third World Countries. The Department of Homeland Security posted that the goal was Remigration now. The federal judge whose ruling against the National Guard deployment had been stayed the week before now found himself facing renewed political pressure. Refugee advocacy organizations, including the International Refugee Assistance Project, criticized the broad asylum suspension as unprecedented and disconnected from any specific risk presented by current applicants. Journalist Spencer Ackerman, who has written extensively about the CIA's Afghanistan operations, described the attack as a case of imperial blowback - violence on American soil as the unintended consequence of American policy abroad. Sarah Beckstrom was 20 years old. She had been in Washington for three months. None of the larger debates that followed her death changed that.