A woman killed by police near the U.S. Capitol after a high-speed Washington, D.C., chase suffered from postpartum depression, the woman's mother said.
Miriam Carey, 34, a dental hygienist from Stamford, Conn., "had postpartum depression after having the baby" in August 2012, the woman's mother, Idella Carey, told ABC News.
"She got sick" a few months after giving birth to Erica, said Carey, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., where Miriam Carey grew up, one of five sisters.
"She was depressed. ... She was hospitalized," Idella Carey said.
Studies indicate the clinical depression can affect between 5 percent and 25 percent of women after childbirth.
Miriam Carey, who had her 14-month-old daughter in the car with her, was killed Thursday after she rammed the car, a black two-door Infiniti sedan, into security posts near the White House and then fled across town to Capitol Hill, prompting police confrontations that ended in gunfire near the Capitol complex.
A Secret Service officer and a Capitol Police officer were injured but were listed in good condition and expected to recover.
Congressional and Supreme Court offices were placed under a temporary lockdown while law enforcement agencies responded to the afternoon incident, which occurred 2 1/2 weeks after the Washington Navy Yard shooting that killed 12 people and injured three others.
"This appears to be an isolated, singular matter, with, at this point, no nexus to terrorism," Capitol Police Chief Kim Dine told reporters.
Police said Erica -- shown in a television video with her hair in braids -- was taken from the car after the shooting and carried by an officer to the back of a patrol car. She was put in protective custody after being examined at a hospital.
Idella Carey told ABC Miriam Carey had "no history of violence" and she did not know why her daughter was in Washington. She said she thought Miriam Carey had taken Erica to a doctor's appointment in Connecticut.
Authorities described Miriam Carey as having a history of mental illness.
"That's impossible. She works, she holds a job," Amy Carey, Carey's sister, a Brooklyn nurse, told The Washington Post.
"That's nuts. We just saw her the other day. She was normal," Malik Santana, 31, a football coach who grew up with Carey, told New York newspaper Newsday.
Dr. Steven Oken, a New York dentist who employed Miriam Carey for eight years, told ABC he "would never in a million years believe that she would do something like this."
"It's the furthest thing from anything I would think she would do, especially with her child in the car. I am floored that it would be her," he said.
But Dr. Barry Weiss, who later employed Carey at his periodontics practice in Hamden, Conn., said he and his partner fired her in August 2012 after 15 months.
He told The New York Times she had trouble getting along with some employees in the small practice.
"When we confronted her about certain situations within the office, she had a temper," he said.
Carey's 50-unit condominium building in Stamford was cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape Thursday evening, and all residents were ordered out of the building.
"A full investigation is under way by federal authorities," Stamford Mayor Michael Pavia was quoted by The (Stamford) Advocate as saying.
FBI and Secret Service agents were seen entering the complex through the night.
"It is a very methodical process, not unlike Newtown," an agent told The Advocate, referring to the Dec. 14, 2012, Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting that killed 20 schoolchildren and six adult staff members.
Condo resident Ray Pagliaruolo, wearing a veterans hat, told the New Haven (Conn.) Register he found the Washington incident that had spread to his condominium building "just amazing."
"The only thing that bothers me," he said, "is that little kid in the back seat. The mother's an adult. She has a choice."
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