Pearce recounts shooting details

Steve Pearce was just stepping in to take batting practice Wednesday morning when he noticed a man who seemed “a little out of place.”

While everyone else at the U.S. House Republican baseball team practice was engaged in their workout or watching the players, Pearce said the man who appeared near the third-base dugout was looking around the field at nothing in particular.

And then he raised a rifle and began firing.

Authorities said four people were shot in the minutes that followed. The shooter, identified as James Hodgkinson, 66, of Belleville, Illinois, was killed by police.

Pearce said his most prominent thought was trying to figure out how to help, but he didn’t know how.

“The security detail were telling us to get cover and get away but the people out on the field didn’t have the value of that,” Pearce said in a telephone conference call with reporters on Wednesday afternoon.

He said he witnessed the shooter aim for Rep. Trent Kelly of Mississippi and miss before shooting Rep. Steve Scalise in the hip.

Scalise, who is from Louisiana, was listed in critical condition on Wednesday afternoon.

Pearce said one shooting victim “stepped out right to where I had been and then was shot. He went down and crawled for cover.”

Pearce was in eastern New Mexico late last month before returning to the Washington, D.C., area.

The shooting happened in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Virginia.

“We know that we are in the congressional office and that we’re very visible,” said Pearce.

“But to see the young staffers gunned down, it just breaks your heart.”

Pearce said the act does not change his opinion on gun control because it is not an issue of policy, it is an issue of division within the country.

“We see people do this with machetes, we see people do this with cars; the problem is not with weapons, it is one with heart,” Pearce said.

He said Republicans and Democrats met after the shooting and agreed the proper response to the tragedy is togetherness.

“For all the noise and all the fury, we are one family,” said Speaker Paul Ryan, addressing the chamber.

Pearce said this could be a turning point for the country.

“These are the points in our nation’s history where we really prove who we are and what we’re about,” he said.

“This doesn’t change my political outlook at all. I will keep working with people across political divisions and I think that is the answer for our state and the answer for our country.”