Three years of bottled-up emotion burst out during the State of the Union as Steven Nikoui waited for Biden to say his son Kareem’s name.
President Joe Biden had been talking for about an hour when Steven Nikoui began feeling like he was sitting in the Colosseum in the movie “Gladiator” rather than at a State of the Union address.
“They’re all sitting in the stands and they’re looking at the beast down there and they’re getting amused. And I felt that. I rationalized it like that and I was a little sickened,” Mr. Nikoui said.
“These people … they wouldn’t even have any of this if it wasn’t for someone like my kid or … any of the others.”
He had hoped this would be the day that President Biden would say his son’s name, Kareem.
But when the president said “America is safer today than when I took office,” the Gold Star father reached a breaking point.
Mr. Nikoui likens the moment as “having an out of the body experience.”
The anger and grief that had been stewing inside him for three years let loose.
“Remember Abbey Gate! United States Marines! Kareem Mae’Lee Nikoui!”
He shouted his son’s name, U.S. Marine Lance Corporal Kareem Nikoui, and the name of the airport gate in Kabul where a suicide bomber killed his son and 12 other U.S. Marines on Aug 26, 2021, during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Then, he was arrested.
Mr. Nikoui, who had been invited to the State of the Union by Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), a veteran, was escorted out of the House Gallery.
“I did have remorse,” he told The Epoch Times. “I felt ashamed.”
Mr. Nikoui said he was placed in handcuffs and escorted to a police substation at the Capitol. There, his mugshot was taken and he was fingerprinted. He said he waived his Miranda Rights.
The officers who arrested him “were pretty good,” he said, but they gave him an ultimatum: “If you talk to us, you‘ll be out in an hour. If you don’t talk to us, you’ll go to the DC jail and see the judge in the morning.”
He said he was scared to go to jail. He’d never been arrested before.
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