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West Virginians question National Guard deployments after attack on 2 of their own
SSgt Jason Mitchell, a member of the West Virginia Air National Guard attends a candlelight vigil for SSgt Andrew Wolfe outside of the Berkley County Sheriff Office on December 3, 2025 in Martinsburg, West Virginia. SSgt Andrew Wolfe was shot on November 26 near The White House in what officials described as a targeted attack by an Afghan refugee who had previously worked with the United States military and C.I.A in Afghanistan. (Michael A. McCoy for NPR)
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WEBSTER SPRINGS, WV. — In West Virginia, many of the thousands of bridges spanning mountain valleys and gorges are named for local veterans and on Main Streets in small towns, banners feature hometown soldiers, some of whom fought and died in past conflicts.
It’s a state with one of the country’s highest per-capita populations of veterans. Service in the military — including the various branches of the National Guard — has long been seen not just as a patriotic duty, but as an economic lifeline, particularly in some of the poorer parts of the state.
The death of Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom in a Washington, D.C. shooting and the wounding of another National Guard soldier — Air Force Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, have brought that reality home once more in their hometowns and across the state.
The two were attacked while patrolling near the White House as part of President Trump’s National Guard deployments to American cities. Trump has said the deployments are necessary to fight crime, but Democratic leaders and federal judges have questioned their legality. In deep red West Virginia too, there appears to be a growing chorus questioning the rationale for sending troops to D.C.
Before moving to nearby Summersville after high school, Beckstrom, 20, grew up in Webster Springs, with its population of just 800 tucked amid mountains and spruce forests. Kenny Kidd has been driving a school bus in the town for years. He remembers all the children and Sarah he says, “was a great kid.”
“She always had a smile on her face. Always willing to help. And she always liked to give me a rough time,” he says laughing.
In this part of the state, job prospects for someone graduating high school are pretty sparse.
“Coal mining is on its way out,” Kidd says. “Other than that, it’s… work at a grocery store or a hardware store. And there’s just not much here.”
Main Street in Webster Springs, W.Va. on Dec. 3, 2025. The small West Virginia town with a population of just 800 offers few job prospects for high school graduates.
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Flags fly at half-staff for West Virginia National Guard Specialist Sarah Beckstrom at the Webster County Courthouse in Webster Springs, W.Va. on Dec. 3, 2025.
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Chris Jackson for NPR
Financially, he says, the Guard is a good deal for young adults. The bonuses can help put them through college, the pay from monthly drills and annual training are much-needed money in their pockets. And then there’s the extra pay from deployments, like the one to D.C., where the West Virginia Guard has more soldiers per capita than any other state.
At a prayer vigil for Wolfe in his hometown of Martinsburg, Air Force Staff Sergeant Jason Mitchell says it was the need to pay off college debt that brought him to the National Guard. Mitchell, who is in the same unit as Wolfe — the 167th Airlift Wing — has served 13 years, but didn’t go to D.C. because he was already deployed in the Middle East as part of a regular rotation. He plans to stay for another seven years to get full retirement benefits, including a pension and veteran healthcare.
“My stepdaughter actually just joined and she graduated basic [training] while I was deployed,” he says. “She was kind of in the same boat where she was going to college and was looking for… an opportunity.”
Members of the West Virginia Public Safety community attend a candlelight vigil for SSgt Andrew Wolfe outside of the Berkley County Sheriff Office on December 3.
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Michael A. McCoy for NPR
Members of the West Virginia Public Safety community attend a candlelight vigil for SSgt Andrew Wolfe outside of the Berkley County Sheriff Office on December 3.
Michael A. McCoy for NPR
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Michael A. McCoy for NPR
At Martinsburg High School, guidance counselor Charity Powers advises seniors. It’s not just one thing that motivates those who choose the Guard, she says. Some want money for college, some want to travel and others see it as a patriotic duty to follow in the footsteps of relatives who’ve served.
“I think in this area, especially for kids who are kind of disadvantaged, which we have a lot of those students, it’s a really good opportunity for them.”
Despite the state’s enthusiasm for the military and the voluntary nature of the D.C. deployment, Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey has found himself on the defensive about it. Amid reports that troops are being employed in tasks such as trash pickup and landscaping instead of security, as the White House has suggested, West Virginia Democratic lawmakers have sharply criticized Morrisey for signing off on it. Several state newspapers have echoed that sentiment on their opinion pages.
Mike Pushkin, a West Virginia House of Delegates member and chairman of the state’s Democratic Party says Beckstrom and Wolfe “would not be there had it not been for the president calling in the National Guard in this strange form of political theater and it unfortunately put them in harm’s way.”
In a statement to NPR, Gov. Morrisey said: “The State of West Virginia is unwavering in its support for our National Guard. Since our founding, our state has a proud history of military service, answering the call for missions across the globe. The mission in D.C. is a continuation of this legacy of service — and we fully back the Guard members who willingly stepped up to clean up crime in our nation’s capital.”
A pedestrian walks into United Bank as ribbons in honor of Sarah Beckstrom adorn the door on Main Street in Webster Springs, W.Va. on Dec. 3.
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But in a state that went heavily for Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024, it’s not difficult to find people who wonder aloud why sending the West Virginia National Guard to Washington makes any sense.
Roseanna Groves, who lives in Webster Springs and is related by marriage to Beckstrom was outraged that the man charged in the attack — an Afghan national who worked with the CIA — had been let into the U.S. at all. She blamed former President Biden, although he was let in under Trump’s administration.
“I think something should be done” about immigrants like him, she says. But she doesn’t understand the decision by Trump and Morrisey to send that Guard to Washington. “I feel it was crazy, I really do,” she says.
It’s a sentiment shared by Kidd, the school bus driver. He’s heard the reports that Beckstrom, Wolfe and others were busy in cleanup instead of “doing their jobs.” It just isn’t worth it, he says.
As for the deployment, “I think it’s turned into a lot more political than anything else,” he says.
Referring to those banners featuring local heroes in towns across West Virginia, “Sarah’s picture … it’ll be next,” he says. “But she’ll be missed.”
The maker of Canvas, the software used by thousands of schools and universities around the world, said on Monday that it had reached a deal with the hackers that recently breached its systems for the return of stolen data and the destruction of any copies.
ShinyHunters, a hacking group, had claimed responsibility for the attack on Instructure, the Salt Lake City-based company that provides Canvas to about half of all colleges and universities in North America.
The hackers said they had accessed the data of more than 275 million users at nearly 9,000 schools worldwide, including private conversations between students and teachers as well as personal identifying information such as names and email addresses. Canvas was shut down for hours after the cyberattack on Thursday.
The agreement, Instructure said in a statement, involved the return of the stolen data and confirmation that the data had been destroyed at the hackers’ end. Instructure added that it had been informed that none of its customers would face extortion as a result of the theft.
“While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cybercriminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible,” the company said.
Instructure did not say what it had given the hackers in exchange for the return of the data. The company did not immediately respond to questions about the deal.
Canvas has more than 30 million active users around the world, according to Instructure. The platform is used by teachers and students for coursework management and communications. Instructure said the data compromised in the hack included usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information and messages.
ShinyHunters on Thursday claimed the attack in a message that appeared on students’ Canvas pages and was obtained by The New York Times. The group warned that it would leak an unspecified amount of data on May 12 if it did not receive a response from Instructure. In its May 3 ransom note, the group had threatened to leak “several billions of private messages among students and teachers.”
Not much is known about ShinyHunters, which is believed to have been formed around 2020. Its goal appears to be to obtain personal records and sell them. One of its high-profile attacks was against Ticketmaster in 2024, when the hackers said they had stolen the user information of more than 500 million customers.
Instructure said it first detected unauthorized activity in Canvas on Apr. 29, and again on May 7. The company said it took Canvas offline to investigate the breach, and also informed the F.B.I., the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other international law enforcement partners.
Instructure did not immediately respond to questions about whether any law enforcement agencies were involved in its dealings with the hackers. The F.B.I. advises against paying ransom to hackers, saying it does not guarantee data security and encourages attackers to target more victims.
The National Quarantine Center is located at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.
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Nebraska Medicine
Sixteen of the 18 passengers transferred to the U.S. from a cruise ship where there was an outbreak of hantavirus arrived in Omaha, Neb., on Monday for evaluation after disembarking the vessel in Spain’s Canary Islands over the weekend.
Of the 15 U.S. citizens and one dual U.S.-British citizen who arrived in Nebraska, all but one are currently being housed in the National Quarantine Unit. That patient tested positive for the virus and was being housed in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, officials said at a Monday news conference. The 15 people in the quarantine unit will continue to be monitored for signs of the illness.
Passengers carry their belongings in plastic bags after being evacuated from the MV Hondius after docking in the Granadilla Port on Sunday in Tenerife, part of the Canary Islands, Spain.
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Nebraska may seem an unlikely location to process these individuals, but it is home to the National Quarantine Unit — the only federally funded quarantine unit in the U.S. — and the separate Nebraska Biocontainment Unit. They are highly specialized facilities located at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) and widely considered among the best in the world.
The $1 million, five-room biocontainment unit was dedicated in 2005. It was a joint project with Nebraska Health and Human Services and the UNMC. It is set up to safely provide medical care for patients with highly hazardous and infectious diseases and was used in 2014 to treat two doctors infected with Ebola. The National Quarantine Unit was completed in late 2019. It cost nearly $20 million, according to the Associated Press. Both facilities were used during the COVID-19 epidemic.
“We are prepared for situations exactly like this,” Dr. Michael Ash, CEO of Nebraska Medicine, said in a statement. “Our teams have trained for decades alongside federal and state partners to make sure we can safely provide care while protecting our staff and the broader community. We are proud to support this national effort.”
Two additional U.S. passengers on the cruise ship — a couple, with one showing symptoms of hantavirus — were transferred for monitoring to Emory University Hospital, where another advanced biocontainment facility is located.
When the biocontainment unit was first dedicated more than 20 years ago, the biggest concerns were anthrax attacks and severe acute respiratory syndrome, more commonly known as SARS, Dr. Phil Smith, who spearheaded the efforts at Nebraska Medical Center to create the biocontainment unit, told the AP in 2020. Smith died last year.
A hallway leading to rooms at the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
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Nebraska Medicine
The quarantine unit features 20 negative-pressure rooms designed to keep potentially harmful particles from escaping by maintaining lower air pressure inside than outside the rooms. The single-occupancy rooms provide patients with attached bathrooms, exercise equipment and Wi-Fi, according to the medical center.
“We have protocols in the quarantine unit that provide for safe care of these of these persons, including just all the activities of daily living so that they can … have a comfortable stay but also have it in an area that’s protected and limits spread of the pathogen,” Dr. Michael Wadman, the medical director of the National Quarantine Unit, said at a Friday news conference.
The biocontainment unit, by contrast, is a patient-care space where people are able to receive medical treatment, Dr. Angela Hewlett, medical director of the biocontainment unit, told reporters Monday.
She emphasized that the facility — which has a 10-bed capacity — operates independently from the quarantine unit and has its own dedicated air-handling system. “We don’t share [it] with any of the rest of the facility,” she said, noting that the unit uses rooftop HEPA filtration and is designed “very differently” from what most people typically imagine in a hospital setting.
One of the rooms in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit.
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Nebraska Medicine
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, speaking at Monday’s news conference, welcomed the recently arrived patients, who are among nearly 150 people from 23 different countries who were aboard the MV Hondius when the illness most commonly transmitted to humans through contact with infected rodents broke out. As of Monday, the World Health Organization has reported at least nine cases of hantavirus, including three deaths.
“We’re glad that you’re here,” Pillen said. “We’re going to ensure that you have the best world-class care possible.”
Pillen also sought to reassure Nebraskans that the facilities are safe and secure: “We’re working diligently to ensure no one leaves the security in an unsecured way at an inappropriate time,” he said. “No one poses a risk to public health, just walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha.”
The hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship has been identified as the Andes strain of the illness, one that can be spread, though rarely, from person-to-person, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It can cause severe respiratory disease, with early flu-like symptoms.
“The Andes variant of this virus does not spread easily, and it requires prolonged, close contact with someone who is already symptomatic,” according to Adm. Brian Christine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who spoke at Monday’s news conference. “Even so, we have taken this situation very seriously from the very start.”
“The risk of hantavirus to the general public remains very, very low,” he said.
The full quarantine period for hantavirus is 42 days, Christine said, but he added that the patients would be allowed to go home if they remained asymptomatic.
“Right now, the passengers that are all in the assessment phase — they’re going to be here for at least a few days while we do assessments and the coordination on what happens next,” he said, adding that they had the option to remain in the quarantine facility for the full period, for “the safest and most effective option for them.”
new video loaded: Americans Exposed to Hantavirus on Cruise Ship Arrive in United States
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transcript
Americans Exposed to Hantavirus on Cruise Ship Arrive in United States
Eighteen passengers who were aboard the MV Hondius, a cruise ship with a deadly hantavirus outbreak, landed in Omaha on a U.S. government medical flight. The passengers were being monitored at medical facilities in Nebraska and Georgia.
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We’re working diligently to ensure no one leaves the security in an unsecured way at an inappropriate time. No one who poses a risk to public health is walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha or beyond.
By Axel Boada
May 11, 2026
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