An analysis comparing the gait of a former female U.S. Capitol Police officer to that of the unidentified January 6 pipe bomb suspect produced a 94% to 98% match, according to a Blaze News investigation corroborated by multiple intelligence sources.
A source familiar with a congressional inquiry into the events of January 6 also told Blaze News that new evidence has surfaced suggesting possible law enforcement involvement in the placement of the explosive devices.
A software algorithm that measures walking characteristics such as knee flexion, hip extension, speed, step length, cadence, and gait variance identified Shauni Rae Kerkhoff, 31, of Alexandria, Va., as a 94% match to the individual seen in surveillance footage placing the January 6 pipe bombs on Jan. 5, 2021, Blaze News reported.
No arrests have been made, however, and no one has been charged as of this writing.
The veteran analyst who conducted the study for Blaze News said that based on his own visual assessment — compensating for areas where the software can struggle — he estimated the match to be closer to 98%.
According to sources cited by Blaze News, Kerkhoff served as a U.S. Capitol Police officer for four and a half years before leaving the department in mid-2021 to take a security position with the Central Intelligence Agency, the outlet said.
CIA spokeswoman Liz Lyons confirmed that the individual in question was employed in campus security.
On Friday night, law enforcement officers appeared to be monitoring Kerkhoff’s residence in Alexandria, Va., according to Blaze News. The outlet’s editor in chief, Christopher Bedford, said he was briefly pulled over by local police after stopping near the home to observe the property but was later permitted to leave.
The FBI — which has been unable to solve the January 6 pipe bomb case after nearly five years of investigation — was within feet of the suspect’s Falls Church address just days after the incident, the outlet reported. The bureau reportedly began closing in on the lead after Blaze News shared its findings with intelligence sources.
Former FBI Special Agent Kyle Seraphin told the outlet that he recently realized he had conducted surveillance at a residence next door to the woman now suspected of planting the pipe bombs.
“The FBI put us one door away from the pipe bomber within days of January 6, and we were deliberately pulled away for no logical or logically investigative reason,” Seraphin told Blaze News Friday. “And everything about that tells me that they were involved in a cover-up and have been since day one.
“They were f**king in on it,” he added.
Seraphin told Blaze News that he had suggested conducting a “knock and talk” with an Air Force civilian employee whose address was linked to a vehicle seen picking up the pipe bomb suspect in Falls Church, Va., on Jan. 5, 2021.
He said his team conducted surveillance on the individual for two days, but his request to approach the person of interest was denied, and the team was pulled from the assignment later that same night.
Seraphin added that he has publicly shared these same details since 2021. “There’s a personal reaction to it, which is the complete vindication that the things I’ve been saying and my recollection of being briefed on this stuff has been accurate for years and I’ve never changed my tune,” he told the outlet.
The forensic analysis commissioned by Blaze News found that Shauni Rae Kerkhoff’s gait matched that of the January 6 pipe-bomb suspect by as much as 98%, according to several current intelligence sources who reviewed the findings.
The analyst who conducted the comparison said the software alone rated the match at 94%, but based on his own assessment — combining human analysis with the program’s results — he estimated the similarity at between 96% and 98%.
Footage of Kerkhoff’s gait was taken from U.S. Capitol Police CCTV video recorded on January 6 and compared to unedited surveillance footage of the suspect wearing a hooded sweatshirt and walking through an alley near C Street to place a suspected pipe bomb behind the Capitol Hill Club around 8:16 p.m. on January 5, 2021, the outlet said.