Holly MatkinWashington, DC – Two South Carolina National Guardsmen deployed to the nation’s capital in the midst of violent uprisings report finding glass baked into the pizza they ordered when they returned to their hotel room.
The soldiers ordered the pizza from an undisclosed local business using Uber Eats and had it delivered to their room at the Marriott Marquis Hotel, The Post and Courier reported.
According to the Department of Defense, the shards of glass had been baked into the cheese and dough of their order.
The soldiers spotted the glass before they had taken a bite and were therefore not injured during the incident, The Post and Courier reported.
None of the other guardsmen reported having experienced similar incidents.
“The service members are okay. It was a single incident,” South Carolina National Guard Captain Jessica Donnelly told the Military Times. “Their command said the Soldiers were advised to file a report with local police department. From my understanding they chose not to. There is no additional information to report.”
The DC Metro Police Department said they were not notified about the incident, The Post and Courier reported.
Nearly 5,000 troops from 11 states and the District of Columbia were deployed to the nation’s capital last week amid the riotous burning and looting that erupted following the May 25 in-custody death of 46-year-old George Floyd in Minneapolis, the Military Times reported.
On June 5, troops returned to their Marriott hotel rooms at 3 a.m. to be greeted with the news that they had to be checked out by 11 a.m. that morning, according to a press release from the office of U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah).
The order to evict approximately 1,200 guardsmen from their hotel accommodations was issued by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Lee fumed at the DC mayor on Twitter immediately after he got the news.
“Just heard that Mayor Bowser is kicking the Utah National Guard out of all DC hotels tomorrow. More than 1200 troops from 10 states are being evicted. This is unacceptable,” Lee tweeted.
“These brave men and women have risked their lives protecting DC for three days. Rioting, looting, arson, and vandalism have all disappeared bc these soldiers served. And now they are being kicked to the curb by an ungrateful mayor. This must be stopped,” he continued in a second tweet.
Bowser sent a letter to President Donald Trump on June 4 that said she had ended the State of Emergency declared earlier in the week after rioting demonstrators set fire to historic churches, vandalized memorials, and looted businesses in protest of Floyd’s death in the custody of Minneapolis police.
In the letter, the mayor asked President Trump to withdraw all “extraordinary federal law enforcement and military presence from Washington, DC.”
Bowser expressed concern in the letter that the presence of “unidentified federal personnel patrolling” caused “safety and national security risks.”
“The deployment of federal law enforcement personnel and equipment are inflaming demonstrators and adding to the grievances of those who, by and large, are peacefully protesting for change and for reforms to the racist and broken systems that are killing Black Americans,” she wrote.
Bowser said additional law enforcement was causing “dangerous confusion” such as “when helicopters are used in a war-like tactic to frighten and disperse peaceful protesters.”
The “peaceful protesters” to whom the DC mayor referred included those who set fire to the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, the AFL-CIO headquarters building, and looted stores downtown, along the K Street corridor, in historic Georgetown, and in tony Friendship Heights along the Maryland line.
The U.S. Senator from Utah was outraged by the treatment that the 200 Guardsman from his state received at the hands of the DC mayor and released a more formal statement about it on the morning of June 5.
“Evicting Utah National Guard personnel from their hotels after a late-night shift risking their lives to protect Washington is a shameful, petty, discrediting decision by Mayor Bowser,” Lee said.
“Our Utah guardsmen are consummate professionals who are not complaining in the slightest,” he continued. “But their labor and sacrifice on behalf of Washingtonians deserves better than this embarrassing spectacle. If Mayor Bowser has a problem with President Trump she should take it up with him, not take it out on National Guard personnel in the middle of a dangerous deployment in her city.”
President Trump was also furious about the “incompetent” DC mayor’s disrespectful move and accused her of constantly looking for “handouts” from the federal government.
At a press conference on the afternoon of June 5, Bowser tried to deny that she’d intentionally evicted the National Guardsmen.
“We never intended to kick them out,” she claimed, and said the city had the unoccupied hotels reserved for COVID-19 patients.
Bowser said it was about who was paying for the rooms.
“Our message to the hotel was that if you are going to use the COVID rooms we’ve reserved, you have to pay for them,” she told reporters. “We understood that would just be a matter of somebody else paying for them, not DC residents.
Then she admitted she had made a move to oust the troops entirely from the city.
“Late last night we made a formal request that those out-of-state troops be called home,” the mayor said.
She complained that when the DC National Guard is called up, they are deputized so they can perform law enforcement duties in the city.
Bowser said that DC National Guard Commanding General William Walker hadn’t checked with her first before deputizing out-of-state guardsmen.
“That won’t be happening anymore,” she told reporters.
Bowser then had the street leading up to the White House painted with 35-foot yellow letters that read “Black Lives Matter.”
She also officially named the street Black Lives Matter Plaza, NW and posted a street sign to formalize the declaration.
On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that the DC protests have become far less violent, and that troops would begin evacuating the DC area, the Military Times reported.
The South Carolina National Guard returned home on Tuesday, according to The Post and Courier.
