BOISE -- A shooting in Washington, D.C., that occurred Thursday afternoon sent Congress into a lockdown as members were trying to end a government shutdown.

Police say a woman tried to ram a White House barricade and then led police on a chase to the U.S. Capitol building.

The woman, who was eventually shot dead by police, had a young child inside the car with her. The child was not injured.

Idaho s congressional delegation is in the nation's capital and KTVB spoke with two of them about what they were doing when the events of the afternoon unfolded.

I was actually sitting back in the cloak room with Speaker [John] Boehner talking about this shutdown that we're in, and trying to talk about how we might get out of it, and what negotiating position we might be in, and those types of things, said Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson.

That s when Boehner s security detail came in and began to surround the speaker and inform him of the situation.

We stayed in the cloak room and actually watched it on TV about what was going on and started listening to the reports that Speaker Boehner's security people brought to him, said Simpson.

Idaho Sen. Jim Risch just left the Capitol and was back in his office to make some calls.

An alert, he described as sounding like a submarine diving, went off notifying everyone of the lockdown.

Obviously you tense up whenever this happens, but I never, it wasn't a situation where there was panic or deeply frightened or anything like that.

Since the events happened outside the Capitol and outside lawmakers' offices, everyone was safe and able to get back to work.

Very quickly we went back to the meetings and discussions we were having on the shutdown and various options and alternatives to bring this to an end, said Risch.

The lockdown at the Capitol lasted about an hour.

Police say the incident appears to be an isolated event and did not have any ties to terrorism.

Because it happened outside on the street, nobody inside was ever in real danger.

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