The Washington DC resident who found a pipe bomb on January 6 initially thought it was something to recycle

• A Capitol Hill resident found the pipe bomb on January 6 near the Republican National Committee.
• At first, Karlin Younger thought it was a recyclable object - until she saw the caps and timer.

Karlin Younger's wine-stained sweater was still wet when she left her laundry room early in the afternoon of January 6, leaned into the gate of an alley on Capitol Hill, and caught a glimpse of something metallic by the garbage bin.

Thinking someone had simply missed the container, she stopped to recycle the mystery object. "Because I'm about that life," she said.

Only as Younger drew closer did she notice the caps at both ends. And the timer.

"You're just staring at it, and you're like, 'Okay, it's definitely metal.' But there's like wires attached to it, and there's a timer attached to it. What am I looking at? It's not immediately obvious because you're just really, really not expecting anything," Younger recalled in an interview with Insider for its comprehensive oral history of the events surrounding the pro-Trump insurrection at the US Capitol.

"You're not on high alert," she added. "You don't think you're under attack. I'm not in Iraq. This is Capitol Hill. And I just see this, and it was the fact it was capped on both ends that made me start to worry that this wasn't just a part from a car or a bike or something, and it was that timer that really got me to be like, 'Wait a minute.'"

So Younger ran. First she went around the corner to the Capitol Hill Club, an exclusive haunt popular among Republican lawmakers near the Capitol. But no one was there.

Then she went to the headquarters of the Republican National Committee. A security guard agreed to take a look for himself at what Younger suspected to be a pipe bomb near the building.

"He walks over, he leans over and just goes, 'Holy shit that's a bomb.' And I was like, 'I knew it, I knew it, I knew this didn't look right.'"

Soon, police arrived on-scene and evacuated her apartment building. In her haste to leave, Younger left her coffee pot on. Outside on the corner, she waited for two hours as federal and local authorities responded.

In the crackle of a police radio, she heard someone say, "Get to the DNC." At the Democratic National Committee blocks away, police found and disarmed a similar device.

'This wasn't just violence'

In the almost 10 months since January 6, the Justice Department has brought more than 600 prosecutions and the House has mounted an investigation amid a national reckoning with a deadly attack on the seat of American democracy.

But the pipe bombs remain a mystery and linger on as a reminder that, for all the violence of January 6, the day could have gone much worse.

Younger spent that evening at a friend's house. She watched the TV coverage of the hordes of Trump supporters storming the Capitol, all the while fielding text messages from family and friends asking if she was OK.

"You started to understand this wasn't just violence, this wasn't just a breach, this is more," she said. "After I called off for the rest of the day, my friend's husband just comes with a bottle of wine and two glasses. If it wasn't for them, I don't know what I would have done."

"We were all just trying to figure out what's going on, everyone's talking to each other, the news is on in the background. It was just disbelief, jaw-dropping disbelief at some of the images that we've now become used to but at the time seemed impossible."

The next morning, Younger returned home and was happy to find the coffee pot had not exploded after being left on overnight. The FBI asked for tips, and at the urging of friends, she called in to identify herself as the woman who discovered the pipe bomb and helped alert local authorities.

The following Monday, the FBI called.

"I didn't think I did anything special," she said. But the agent saw things differently.

"You don't understand," the agent said, "that there are people who wouldn't have said anything."

Check out the full oral history here.