Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, the 20-year-old National Guard member who was fatally shot while on patrol in Washington D.C. this week, had mixed feelings about her deployment to the nation’s capital, according to her former boyfriend.
Beckstrom and 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe were shot while on patrol on Thanksgiving Eve; Beckstrom died as a result, while Wolfe is still in critical condition. Both were members of the West Virginia National Guard.
CNN interviewed Adam Carr, who dated Beckstrom for six years before breaking up last month, and asked how she felt about her deployment to D.C., a controversial move made by President Donald Trump in August.
“Did she believe in the mission of being there? Did she think it was important, or did she think they didn’t belong there, the West Virginia National Guard?” CNN correspondent Gabe Cohen asked Carr.
“It was mixed,” he explained. “She got deputized in there, and they gave them no rights to do anything.”
He continued, “She was like, ‘People spit towards us, cuss at us, throw things at us and we can’t do nothing.’ She couldn’t detain nobody. She couldn’t stop them from doing wrong. It was—they told them to call the cops.”
“She wanted to make the difference. She wanted to extremely. She was happy with it. And she just was also like, ‘Why am I here if I can’t do nothing?’ Where they limited them so much. She’s like, ‘It’s pointless.’ She’s like, ‘I get why we’re here. Crime is bad, but it’s pointless if we can’t do anything.’”
The president deployed thousands of National Guard troops to the capital in August in what he claimed was a response to out-of-control crime in the city. Left with little to do once they arrived, however, soldiers found themselves participating in neighborhood beautification efforts to pass the time.
Trump announced Beckstrom’s death on Thursday during a live-streamed call with service members from Mar-a-Lago, where he spent the Thanksgiving holiday.
“I must unfortunately tell you that just seconds before I went on, right now, I heard that Sarah Beckstrom of West Virginia, one of the guardsmen that we’re talking about, highly respected, young, magnificent person, started service in June of 2023, outstanding in every way, she’s just passed away,” he said.
Beckstrom’s father also confirmed his daughter’s death on Thursday in a devastating Facebook post, writing, “My baby girl has passed to glory. If I don’t talk to you don’t be offend[ed] this has been a horrible tragedy.”
Carr described Beckstrom as a “loving, caring person” who ”had a huge heart” in his interview with CNN, something that he said was clear in the little things she did for him every day.
“She would make lunch for me in the morning. I’d get up by the crack of dawn and it’s still dark and she’d be out there in the kitchen making some sandwiches, throwing in some chips, asking what type of fruit I wanted,” Carr told CNN. “I told her not to worry about it, and she would still get up for it anyways, even though she’s got work in a few hours and could be sleeping.”
He added that even if she didn’t know you, “She’d do anything for you.”
”One of the best people around that you could meet,” said Carr.
