JACKSONVILLE, Fla — She has a national profile with local roots. Congresswoman Val Demings became a leader in a push to impeach President Trump and she was vetted as a candidate to become Joe Biden's running mate.
Demings has put Jacksonville on the map before as the first woman to head the Orlando Police Department in 2007, but her road to success wasn't paved. She grew up on a dirt road in Mandarin as Valdez Venita Butler, the youngest of seven children.
"I grew up in a two-bedroom, wood-framed house," Demings explained. "I can remember being very cold in the winter and very hot during the summer. I can remember it felt colder in the house than it did outside. My mother would light this gas heater and we would gather around that heater the best we could to warm up."
She grew up extremely poor, attending segregated schools in the 1960s.
"I was bussed to Pine Forrest," Demings said. "In sixth grade, when they integrated Loretta Elementary, I got to go to a school that was much closer to my home in Mandarin. The joys and pain of integrating schools — you can imagine that."
Her dad, James Butler was a janitor determined to make ends meet for his family of nine. Demings mother, Elouise, was a maid.
"I give her all of the credit for pushing us and giving us the ability to see past our current circumstances," Demings said. "To a future that could be brighter."
The youngest of seven children, Demings became the first in her family to graduate from college. By 2020 a spotlight hit the Jacksonville native like she had never felt before.
"I did not raise my hand and say 'Please vet me for Vice President of the United States,'" Demings said. "I think sometimes you don't choose the situation, the situation chooses you."
The vetting process, she says, was tedious, consisting of interviews that lasted four, sometimes five hours. No one was off-limits — not her three sons, six siblings or her husband of 32 years.
"There wasn't a day that went by during the process that I didn't say 'Why the hell am I doing this?'" Demings said.
She admits the search of her grown sons' social media pages made her particularly nervous. And as a member of the Orlando Police Department, she recalls her fears of not being there for them, not being able to shield her children.
"I remember I would go to work wondering if I would be able to see them again and wondering what was going to happen to them if their mother was not here," Demings said.
The grim reality of a career she and her husband chose. One now under fire, leading to protests and calls for de-funding the police.
"The first thing we need to do is not entertain a ridiculous idea like de-funding the police," Demings said. "I served in the job for a lot of years and when I need the police, God-forbid, I want them to come and I know you do as well."
She can easily be described as direct and firm as displayed during her questioning of social media executives and her appointment in President Trump's impeachment hearings.
"I know for a fact that the impeachment managers, the seven of us under the leadership of our chairman, Adam Schiff presented an overwhelming case against the President of the United States that was clear and convincing," Demings stated. "What we had was a senate that did not have the courage to do the right thing and hold the President accountable."
Known as the tattletale among her four brothers and two sisters Demings says she's been holding people accountable for as far back as she can remember. Holding on to her mother's words, "People will call you names, they have, they will say bad things about you- they have and still do on occasion. But you always do what's right!"
Democratic U.S. Rep. Val Demings is campaigning to serve a third term in Florida's Congressional House District 10. She's facing Republican Vennia Francois.