The reason Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) tossed away a pin honoring a little victim of the Uvalde, Texas school shooting just seconds after receiving it has finally been revealed.
The pin was an exact duplicate of the green Converse shoes that 10-year-old Maite Rodriguez was wearing when she was shot and died. Those shoes made it possible for Maite’s relatives to locate her body after she passed away.
Boebert apologized for “the appearance” of “disrespecting a child” by throwing the pin into the trash, but she blamed her actions on wearing AirPods and claimed the man who handed her the pin had previously approached her “aggressively” in a video shared by the PatriotTakes account on Twitter.
As the man handed me what turned out to be a memorial pin, Boebert said, “I recognized him as a man who came at me quite forcefully just a few weeks prior during a press appearance. I was walking, had AirPods in, and tried to tell the man that I was occupied, but he persisted. He was so combative that Capitol Police officers detained him after being captured by another member.
According to Boebert, she intended to “make it very clear that I did not want to receive anything that this man had to give, nor did I know what he was handing me.”
She continued by stating that she had been “very vocal” against the shooting in Uvalde and that she had thrown away the pin with no malice.
Boebert gets him mistaken with Jake Burdett, an activist who was kicked out of a press conference by Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) in May for raising concerns about Boebert’s divorce, according to Elijah Pelton, the activist who gave Boebert the pin.
An image of the pin, which was affixed to a card outlining Maite’s tale, is seen below along with footage of Boebert tossing it into the trash during their encounter last week.
