Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) broke his silence on Tuesday morning after being carjacked Monday night by armed assailants in Washington, D.C.
The 68-year-old congressman was carjacked in D.C.’s upscale Navy Yard neighborhood just before 10 p.m. EST. A police alert said that law enforcement was searching for “three black males wearing all black clothing.”
“I was just coming into my place, three guys came out of nowhere and they pointed guns at me,” Cuellar told reporters. “I do have a black belt, but I recognize when you got three guns — I looked at one with a gun, another with a gun, a third one behind me — so they said they wanted my car and I said sure.”
“You got to keep calm under those situations and then they took off,” he continued. “They recovered the car. They recovered everything, what really got me upset was they took my sushi but anyway, that’s something else. And they did recover the sushi after all.”
Cuellar suggested that the incident did not significantly impact him emotionally and that his message following the incident was, “You got to support law enforcement.”
When asked by a reporter if security should be boosted for members of Congress following the incident, Cuellar responded: “I don’t know. I’ll leave that to House administration, but this happened less than a mile away from the Capitol.”
“And my place, you got our leader Hakeem [Jeffries] there, Katherine Clark who lives there, a whole bunch of members that live in that place,” he continued. “So, I’ll leave that up to the police.”
WATCH:
“Three guys came out of nowhere and they pointed guns at me” – video of @RepCuellar (D-TX) recounting getting carjacked last night. ATTN: .@AlanHenney pic.twitter.com/b9WKEmsiU1
— Brent Baker 🇺🇦 (@BrentHBaker) October 3, 2023
This report has been updated to include additional information.