No, Officer Sicknick didn’t die from a fire extinguisher to the head, thrown by Trump supporters on January 6th. Nor did he die from an allergic reaction to bear spray wielded by those same protestors. Here’s the actual story as announced by the medical examiner – which conforms to what for quite some time has seemed the most likely cause of his death to anyone paying attention to the facts:
Francisco Diaz, the chief medical examiner for Washington, D.C., told the Washington Post that Sicknick died on Jan. 7 after suffering two strokes and that he did not suffer an allergic reaction to any chemical irritants.
The medical examiner’s office told the Washington Examiner that Sicknick’s “cause of death” was “acute brainstem and cerebellar infarcts due to acute basilar artery thrombosis” — a stroke — and the “manner of death” was “natural.” The office said Sicknick was sprayed with a chemical substance around 2:20 p.m. on Jan. 6, collapsed at the Capitol around 10 p.m. that evening, and was transported by emergency services to a local hospital. He died around 9:30 p.m. on Jan. 7, the office added.
But the political damage was done by the Times reporting the lies about Sicknick’s death, and those lies almost immediately getting halfway around the world. I bet a lot of people will never read Officer Sicknick’s actual cause of death, and will instead continue to believe the lies.
And that’s the purpose of the lies in the first place.
I’ve written many times about Officer Sicknick’s death. It was already known shortly after he died that a stroke might have been involved. As early as January 11th, for example – just a few days after the January 6th event and Sicknick’s January 7th death – I wrote a post that included these words:
The cause of death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick is still unclear. Early reports that it was from an injury have not been confirmed, and there are some reports that he died of a medical condition. I assume that some day we’ll learn more.
On January 26th I revisited the case at some length. We still had no further evidence about the cause of Sicknick’s death, but the fire extinguisher story had become even more suspect. By the time I wrote this January 30th post, I had learned that the original source for the fire extinguisher story had been anonymous “officials” talking to the NY Times. I also learned that ABC had reported much earlier on the stroke possibility, although by late January the MSM seemed to have conveniently forgotten about it and instead the fire extinguisher story was stated just about everywhere as though it were a proven fact.
My writing about this back then wasn’t an example of ESP on my part. Nor did it demonstrate amazing deductive skills. I was merely relying on basic information that had been right out in the open, easily available to anyone with curiosity and the ability to do a few searches. And yet there were very few people questioning the fire extinguisher story at the time, even on the right.
The WaPo story from yesterday that announced Diaz’s findings also says this:
The ruling, released Monday, likely will make it difficult for prosecutors to pursue homicide charges in the officer’s death.
Yes indeed, it’s often “difficult to pursue homicide charges” when no homicide has occurred. But where there’s a will, there’s a way – as we’ve seen in the Chauvin trial, for example.
More:
Diaz also said there was no evidence of internal or external injuries.
No blow to the head. Nothing even remotely resembling the fire extinguisher story.
The WaPo article goes on at some length in describing the earlier reports about Sicknick having been injured. They even include this from Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey:
The senator described Sicknick’s death as a “crime” that “demands the full attention of federal law enforcement.” He said that “when white supremacists attacked our nation’s capital, they took the life of one of our officers. They spilled his blood, they took our son away from his parents. They took a sibling away from their brothers.”
I believe that is the narrative most people will continue to take away from this.
[NOTE: Glenn Greenwald, who has written a lot about the Sicknick case, has an excellent article about yesterday’s announcement, in which he states this:
It was crucial for liberal sectors of the media to invent and disseminate a harrowing lie about how Officer Brian Sicknick died. That is because he is the only one they could claim was killed by pro-Trump protesters at the January 6 riot at the Capitol…
…[C]able outlets and other media platforms repeated this lie over and over in the most emotionally manipulative way possible…
As I detailed over and over when examining this story, there were so many reasons to doubt this storyline from the start. Nobody on the record claimed it happened. The autopsy found no blunt trauma to the head. Sicknick’s own family kept urging the press to stop spreading this story because he called them the night of January 6 and told them he was fine — obviously inconsistent with the media’s claim that he died by having his skull bashed in — and his own mother kept saying that she believed he died of a stroke.
But the gruesome story of Sicknick’s “murder” was too valuable to allow any questioning. It was weaponized over and over to depict the pro-Trump mob not as just violent but barbaric and murderous, because if Sicknick weren’t murdered by them, then nobody was.
Much more at the link, including the fact that Greenwald had been derisively labeled by MSM reporters as a “Sicknick truther.” They will not be saying any mea culpas about that, either, nor about the other lies they promulgated. They will just move on to the next one.]