Ashli Babbitt in her driver’s-license photo. Maryland MVA/Calvert County Sheriff’s Office via AP© Provided by Business Insider Ashli Babbitt in her driver’s-license photo. Maryland MVA/Calvert County Sheriff’s Office via AP.
Ashli Babbitt was fatally shot by police on January 6 as she climbed through a window into the Speaker’s Lobby during the Capitol insurrection.
Four years earlier, Babbitt repeatedly rammed her SUV into the vehicle of Celeste Norris, with whose boyfriend of six years she was having an extramarital affair, the Associated Press reported.
Speaking publicly for the first time on the incident with the Associated Press, Norris said she found out in 2015 that Aaron Babbitt, her longtime boyfriend, was cheating on her with his coworker Ashli McEntee, who was married to Timothy McEntee at the time.
When Norris found out about the affair, she told Timothy McEntee, which prompted the future Mrs. Babbitt to chase down and ram Norris’ vehicle a few weeks later, Norris told the Associated Press.
Deputies responded to the incident, and Babbitt was issued a criminal summons on charges of reckless endangerment and malicious destruction of property, which were later updated to include reckless driving, negligent driving, and failure to control a vehicle’s speed to avoid a collision, said a case report from the Calvert County Sheriff’s Office in Maryland, which the Associated Press obtained.
While Norris obtained a peace order — legal protection for victims of abuse who aren’t eligible to file for a protective order — Babbitt was acquitted by a judge of the criminal charges after saying under oath that she had collided with Norris, but portraying the vehicular collision as an accident, the Associated Press reported.
In February 2017, Norris obtained a second peace order against Babbitt, who she said had been harassing and stalking her, the Associated Press reported. She wrote in her petition that she had been receiving repeated calls in the middle of the night from an unlisted number, and that Babbitt had recently followed her home from work, the report said.
Ashli eventually moved to San Diego, took over a local business, and married Aaron Babbitt after a divorce from Timothy McEntee was granted by the state of Maryland.