Four years after Ashli Babbitt was shot and killed as she tried to climb through a shattered glass door on Jan. 6, 2021 — quite literally all that separated lawmakers inside the U.S. Capitol from a raging mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters — her family has received a settlement of $5 million from the U.S. Department of Justice.
The settlement figure in the wrongful death lawsuit first brought in January 2024 was reported by The Washington Post and confirmed to CBS News by outgoing U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger.
In January 2024, Babbitt’s husband, Aaron Babbitt, and the family’s estate sued the federal government with the help of Judicial Watch, a far-right legal network long allied with President Donald Trump. Their wrongful death claim painted the 35-year-old’s journey from California to Washington, D.C., in January 2021, as a trip Babbitt took to “exercise what she believed were her God-given, American liberties and freedoms.”
Babbitt wasn’t there for an “unlawful or nefarious purpose,” the family’s lawyers claimed, but only went to attend the Women for America First rally at the Ellipse and to listen to Trump speak. (Women for America First was integral in generating support for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement, and records uncovered by the Interior Department’s inspector general in December 2023 revealed the group lied on a permit form to the National Park Service about its intentions for its Jan. 6 rally. The group claimed attendees would not march to the Capitol when in fact, text messages sent by Women for America First to a speaker for the Jan. 6 rally indicated that was exactly what they intended: “This stays only between us, we are having a second stage at the Supreme Court again after the ellipse. POTUS is going to have us march there/the Capitol.”)
