U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito says that U.S Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom was a “peacekeeper” who showed courage and honor as she served the nation.

Beckstrom, a member of the West Virginia National Guard, died Thursday at the age of 20. She was one of two guard members ambushed in what authorities are calling a targeted attack on the pair, just two blocks from the White House on Wednesday afternoon.

“I’m sure as the days move forward, we’re going to hear a lot of really good stories about Sarah and her life,” Captio said in a news conference call Friday morning.

Captio is also asking for prayers for U.S. Air Force Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, 24, of Martinsburg, who remains hospitalized with critical injuries following the shooting incident.

Beckstrom and Wolfe are among roughly 2,100 members of the National Guard who have been on the ground in Washington, DC, as a part of President Trump’s order to root out and deter crime.

Capito says the initiative is working. She said in the past few years, four of her staffers have been assaulted.

“They volunteered on a mission that the President asked to come to Washington, DC, our capital city, that is riddled, riddled with violent crime, half a block from where my apartment is in DC when I’m there. A security guard was carjacked and murdered sitting in his car as he was waiting to go into work,” Capito said. “This was not, this was not an unusual occurrence in what was happening in DC. So by bringing the National Guard or bringing a presence to the district, what happened? Murder rates are down. Violent assaults are down. Carjackings are down. People are safer. I felt safer.”

Capito says that she believes the West Virginia National Guard should continue to serve in DC on a voluntary basis. In August, up to 400 members of the WVNG arrived for the mission. The 160 that remain are there as volunteers. The plan put into place just last week has those members staying through the end of 2025.

The man who stands accused of the ambush is an Afghan national who was granted asylum in the United States. Capito says he was a father who lived in Washington State.

“Well, I mean, I think we saw when we saw the disastrous. And it was disastrous and costly both in terms of our military drawdown in Afghanistan, that there was no plan there. It was chaos and this individual was probably swept up in the chaos. It looks like he might have helped in some CIA direct missions,” Capito said.

President Trump has said that he is suspending all immigration requests for Afghan nationals and issuing a directive to re-examine the status of those who entered the U.S. under the previous administration. Capito says the vetting process needs to be reviewed.

Capito acknowledges that the role the National Guard is playing right now is a source of controversy.

“They are basically peacekeepers, and I think if our mayors don’t step up and keep the peace in our larger cities, I was thinking our state, I would say that we would need cooperation from the governors. I would think the governors, like in Tennessee when the guard, when the president offered the guard’s assistant in Memphis, which is the number one city for crime in this country, the governor said ‘yes, thank you. We would love to have some assistance.’ So I do think that if you go to other cities, you have to work with the local authorities and certainly the governor. And I know that’s a source of controversy. We’ll see where that goes. It might be in the court systems right now.”