“Gladys Sicknick, the mother of Brian Sicknick – the U.S. Capitol Police officer who died after supporters of former President Trump stormed the building on January 6 – said her final interaction with her son was brief. ‘He texted me, he says, ‘I’m busy right now, I can’t talk,” she told CBS News’ Nikole Killion. ‘And that was the last I heard from him.’ Sicknick and her son’s longtime partner Sandra Garza were on Capitol Hill last week to lobby lawmakers to vote for an independent commission to investigate what happened on January 6. Senate Republicans blocked the effort on Friday. The two women say they will keep fighting for answers over the events which they think led to Officer Brian Sicknick’s death. As he defended the Capitol that day, he had been attacked with chemical spray and collapsed later in the day. Garza recalled the fateful call to rush to the hospital – but she didn’t get to say goodbye. ‘They would not let me back to see Brian,’ she said.”

“‘It was only then, when the emergency physician and the charging nurse came out to tell me, that you know, he was on a ventilator. And I knew. I knew then that he wasn’t fine.’ In the months since, consolation has come through cards from complete strangers. Sicknick said they kept coming even when she thought they’d be done, ‘from all over the country and the world.’ ‘There are good people in this world,’ she said. Despite their best efforts, Garza and Sicknick watched as the Senate struck the commission down 54-35, just shy of the 60-vote threshold. ‘I’m disgusted that the Republican senators, that decided to vote no. It’s a spit in the face to Brian, it’s a spit in the face to all the officers that were there that day,’ Garza said. She said the senators who did not even show up for the vote committed a ‘dereliction of duty'” – CBS News.