A documentary miniseries on Fox Nation probes the origins and the impact of the 2017 shooting in Alexandria that severely wounded a congressional leader and a lobbyist — and could have been much worse.
June 14 marks the seventh anniversary of the shooting at Eugene Simpson Stadium Park, in Alexandria, during a Republican practice for the annual Congressional Baseball Game. Peter Doocy, the White House correspondent for Fox News, says his special series Strike Zone: The Congressional Baseball Shooting breaks new ground.
“Nobody until now has actually done a TV documentary, or a streaming documentary, about this Congressional baseball shooting,” Doocy says. “There was a ton of coverage in the beginning; there have been some great print pieces written, but nobody has actually taken the time to go talk on camera in a long-form format, to everybody that was there.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and lobbyist Matt Mika were critically injured in the shooting but survived. The gunman, James Hodgkinson, of Illinois, a former Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer with a history of domestic violence, was shot by police and died of his injuries.
Doocy’s three-part series on the on-demand streaming service starts on June 11 and takes viewers back to the scene of the shooting — something he hadn’t experienced either.
“We had the privilege of going back to the baseball practice field with Majority Leader Scalise, and to be standing there at second base with him as he talks about this story that changed his life forever, and could have changed the country for decades,” Doocy says. “It was really, really powerful.”
Doocy also has interviews from the scene with Capitol Police Officer David Bailey, “walking us through this shootout where he was trying to save two dozen members of Congress from a would-be assassin with a much bigger gun.” He and Officer Crystal Griner were wounded in the shooting and were both credited with saving dozens of lives.
New Information
Doocy lived a few minutes away from the field at the time of the Congressional Baseball Game shooting, and says he has always kept up with new developments in the story, but the first-hand interviews were eye-opening.
“There’s a lot of stuff that we were able to learn from the people that were there that I did not know, until the last couple of weeks,” he says.
While Doocy was tight-lipped on the new facts viewers could learn from the new series, he did relate a few of the aspects of the story that surprised him.
The field “not changed that much,” Doocy says. While listening to Scalise tell the story of how he was stranded, a bullet in his hip and far from any cover, at second base, a baseball team was getting ready to come out and use the field for practice. He also notes that some of the chain-link fence around the field that was shattered by bullets still hasn’t been replaced.
Before and After
The special does “a lot of digging into the assailant’s background,” Doocy says, and that also turned up lots of background information that was new to him.
“You get a sense of how many red flags were missed by people who heard him or read something that he wrote on Facebook, and didn’t say anything. And then you know, he makes it all the way to Alexandria from Illinois, trying to do serious, serious damage,” Doocy says.
Strike Zone also looks at some of the political and legal fallout from the shooting, including the long campaign to have the incident reclassified to an act of domestic violent extremism from its previous “suicide by cop,” Doocy says.
Doocy spent the day reporting from George Washington University Hospital, where many of those who were wounded were sent. Doocy recounts seeing that “the paramedics were out there wiping blood off of their equipment and off of some stretchers right outside of the hospital.”
He hopes the stories and the visual aspect of the series give people a visceral sense of the danger that the players, and the U.S. Capitol Police and Alexandria police, were up against.
“You get a sense of how brave the Capitol Police and the other first responders were,” Doocy says about the Congressional Baseball Game shooting and its aftermath. “And these very, very brave men and women saved dozens of lives, and it’s really remarkable to see it … in the way that we’re putting it together.”
Feature image courtesy Fox Nation
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