Five years ago today, a mob stormed the US Capitol trying to stop Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election.

I remember watching it happen in real time, on PBS NewsHour’s YouTube stream.

I had been catching up with two colleagues, Matt Wynn and Ryan Marx, because we’d all been busy and wanted to plan what we could do in 2021. We thought it would be a year to get ambitious again, with a COVID-19 vaccine soon available and the world opening up. We were definitely going to do something with the 2020 Census, and maybe a wildfires investigation. None of us had any meetings the afternoon of Jan. 6, and for some reason, we thought it would be a quiet day.

I had the NewsHour’s livesream on in the background. As we talked, I watched the rioters break through police barricades. I watched them get into the building. We stopped talking for a minute and I turned up the volume as Lisa Desjardins, standing just inside the Capitol, was able to catch a few people coming into the building and talk to them on camera. It was surreal. And then we said, “We need to get to work.”

My team at Gannett, the Storytelling Studio, didn’t usually handle breaking news. I liked to say that we didn’t fight fires, we built fire engines. Here, though, was a fire.

I spent the next day scraping Facebook profiles of suspected rioters. I don’t remember what became of that, but I remember the bizarre feeling of collecting videos and photos uploaded freely by people who broke into a public building. Everything was just there, online.

A day later, someone from the investigations team – I think Dinah Pulver but I’m not certain – mentioned a spreadsheet with about 40 names on it, of people arrested during the riot. We all knew there’d be more. Could we track this in some way so the public could follow?

That turned into a database eventually including 1,183 people.

While lots of stories were written, I’m particularly proud of that database, because it was the most complete accounting we did of who was arrested and what happened in their cases.

It was tedious work at times. Doug Caruso, in particular, deserves credit for keeping it going, often doing checks to start his day. Ryan designed the page, and redesigned it (and probably redesigned it a few more times) as it grew beyond what our original framework could handle.

I’m linking to the Wayback Machine above, because Gannett has since turned off the server powering that page. It’s gone (along with most of my work there).

On his first day back in office, Donald Trump pardoned everyone involved in the insurrection, the first pardon of his second term.

I’m writing this now, because I want to capture my memories before they fade, too. It’s been a long five years.

Updated because Ryan Marx reminded me that he was on that call, too.