Qualla: 2025 Washington, D.C., National Guard shooting

2025 Washington, D.C., National Guard shooting: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gryffindor, Public domain. He came up from the I Street sidewalk just before two in the afternoon on November 26, 2025, the day before Thanksgiving. The two National Guard soldiers were standing post at the intersection of 17th and I, two blocks northwest of the White House, in the camouflage utility uniform of the West Virginia Army National Guard. Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, had been deployed to Washington that August. Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, 24, had enlisted before he finished high school. The shooter approached them on foot with a .357 Magnum Smith and Wesson revolver concealed at his side. He fired at Beckstrom first. She fell. He fired at Wolfe, who tried to take cover behind a bus shelter. When his own gun was empty he picked up Beckstrom's M4 carbine and used it to shoot Wolfe a second time. Both soldiers were shot in the head. Sarah Beckstrom died the next day. The man charged with killing her was a 29-year-old Afghan asylee named Rahmanullah Lakanwal, and until August 2021 he had been a U.S. ally.

Image: Gryffindor | Public domain

2025 Washington, D.C., National Guard shooting: The Deployment

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit G. Edward Johnson, CC BY 4.0. 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 poste...

Image: G. Edward Johnson | CC BY 4.0

2025 Washington, D.C., National Guard shooting: Who Sarah Beckstrom Was

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rdsmith4, CC BY-SA 2.5. 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 tr...

Image: Rdsmith4 | CC BY-SA 2.5

2025 Washington, D.C., National Guard shooting: The Shooter's Past

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 lar...

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

2025 Washington, D.C., National Guard shooting: The Political Reaction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Public domain. 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 ind...

Image: U.S. Department of Homeland Security | Public domain