By Donald Jeffries
For months following the Jan. 6, 2021, protest at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., the mainstream media harped on the “deaths” caused by what they ludicrously smeared as “insurrectionists.” Police officer Brian Sicknick, for instance, was repeatedly said to have been killed after being struck in the head by a fire extinguisher, wielded by the “insurrectionists.”
The most prominently mentioned victim of Jan. 6 was San Diego native and Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt. On Oct. 9, 2022, this writer interviewed Ashli Babbitt’s mother, Micki Witthoeft, on the weekly live streaming program “I Protest.” Witthoeft said:
A lot of people don’t realize that Ashli was not the only unarmed American citizen to die that day. We had Ashli Babbitt, Rosanne Boyland, Kevin Greeson, Benjamin Phillips, and, in my opinion, officer Brian Sicknick’s blood is on [the Feds] hands, because he had a stroke that day and, in sticking with the theme of that day, they did not render him aid. My daughter had a possibly survivable wound if they had rendered her aid or let American citizens who were there and ready and capable of rendering her aid.
She charged that all the victims had been “lost in the shuffle.” Witthoeft continues to hold a nightly vigil outside what she refers to as the “D.C. Gulag,” and has regularly attended the trials of other Jan. 6 defendants.
The name of the Capitol police officer who shot the unarmed Babbitt was withheld for a long time by our state-controlled media. Eventually, he was revealed to be Michael Byrd, whose problematic record as a police officer included leaving his loaded weapon unattended in a Capitol building bathroom.
Not only did Byrd go unpunished, he was largely lauded as a hero by the fawning media and sycophantic politicians. In an interview with NBC News, Byrd expressed no remorse and insisted he “saved many lives” with what he felt was an act of “utmost courage.” Byrd dubiously claimed to have been threatened, but Ashli’s widower Aaron Babbitt told Tucker Carlson that he was receiving multiple death threats every day.
Thanks to the work of researcher Gary McBride, we know that another unarmed woman, Rosanne Boyland, was killed by a police officer that day. Eyewitness Philip Anderson, a Black Trump supporter who was trampled by police officers and could well have died himself, wrote the following on Instagram before his account was taken down: “To all the people who called me a liar when I said Rosanne Boyland was holding my hand when she died. We both were getting crushed to death as Capitol police pushed and beat more people on top of us instead of letting us get up.”
Anderson accused the police of spraying tear gas and beating protesters and maintained that they caused a stampede. Two other eyewitnesses told the conservative website “Gateway Pundit” that police were pushing Trump supporters down the steps. Video shows Rosanne Boyland being beaten with batons, and the female officer who may have caused her death was Lila Morris. Morris’s identity is clearly being protected, as online searches relating to her bring up few if any pertinent results.
Meanwhile, officer Sicknick, despite numerous media reports about him being killed by “insurrectionists with a fire extinguisher,” in fact died from a stroke, according to both the medical examiner and his own family. Kevin Greeson and Benjamin Phillips died from natural causes (heart attack and stroke) due to the physical and/or emotional stress of the day and the fact that the chaotic scene made the medical treatment of these two men secondary to the immediate goals of the police.
In addition to the five known people who died on Jan. 6, at least four police officers working the rally that day went on to commit suicide within five months of the event. In addition, Jan. 6 suspect Matthew Perna, who was apparently despondent over a potential prison sentence and what his family called the “persecution” he endured from friends, relatives, and “many members of the community,” took his own life in Feb. 2022. Sicknick was consistently reported to have “died from injuries” sustained in the protest and was given the rare honor of lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda.
As recently as March 2022, Joe Biden falsely claimed that protesters had killed five police officers on Jan. 6. This figure obviously is a convoluted attempt to attribute Sicknick’s death by stroke and the four later suicides to the “insurrectionists.”
Reports from across our state-controlled media contended that protesters had caused deaths that day. In fact, only one person was known to have been killed, Babbitt—shot to death by unpunished officer Byrd. Boyland was either crushed by a police-led surge, and left untreated to die, or beaten to death by unpunished (and largely unidentified) officer Morris. Many protesters remain in danger of receiving long and unjust prison sentences simply for exercising their constitutional rights.
