Capitol Police officer suffered two strokes after riot, died of natural causes | Hacker News Reader

Capitol Police officer suffered two strokes after riot, died of natural causes

washingtonpost.com

55 pointsAndrewBissell43 comments

As a life-long liberal, I am fed-up with the NYT. Yellow cake bogus story to get us to invade Iraq. Bogus story of Russian bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan (has been refuted by US intelligence agencies). They ran with the story that Officer Brian Sicknick died from being attacked by the January 6 mob, even when the officer's family almost immediately disputed the NYT stories.

Does the NYT just not care that they keep getting called out for bogus stories? I just looked at the NYT, and I saw no retraction from their previously incorrect stories on Officer Sicknick.

Free advice, so obviously feel free to ignore it: Democracy Now has a liberal and honest (as far as I can tell) approach to the news. BBC News and The Guardian are good also. Don't waste your time with NYT, MSNBC, and Fox - unless you enjoy living in a little fake bubble and like having your own biases just reflected back at you.

Libertarian/AnCap here, and I agree with you 100%

Greenwald covers the full evolution of this story here[1].

[1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-a...

I used to be a huge fan of Greenwald, but it seems lately his fixation on being critical of other media often leads him to ignore the obvious.

Law enforcement were the ones who initially said the officer died after engaging with protesters and video showed protestors physically engaged with officers in multiple videos so it's not like it's an unbelievable claim. The media didn’t invent that narrative.

If the basis of his argument starts with an obvious falsehood, then how reliable is the rest of it? Throw it all away I guess, Greenwald too.

> Law enforcement were the ones who initially said the officer died

And does anyone know the names of those law enforcement officials? Because as far as I know they never said who it was.

Greenwald is rightfully fixated on criticism of media, because there is a lot to be critical of.

> it's not like it's an unbelievable claim. The media didn’t invent that narrative.

They were recklessly uncritical of an anonymous law enforcement source, while ignoring opposing evidence. From the 3rd paragraph of the article:

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.

The media does not show this level of credulity in unnamed law enforcement sources when told, for example, that an officer acted in self-defense when shooting a Black suspect. Their naivete comes and goes as convenient.

I feel it's a strange consumption pattern to rely on a single news source, when Google News or Apple News is a much easier way to follow a story.

It makes more sense to follow the stories you care about rather than simply the sources you trust. Even if you trusted the NYT, many of their articles aren't going to be relevance to you. It's like going back to the old school RSS model where you scroll past a bunch of articles.

I would also point out Axios, which has been praised by Sarah Sanders when she was the WH press secretary, and has an interesting way of summarizing news as digestible bullet points.

What I use to do as read through the newspaper to learn about issues and events that may not effect me personally.

Then I'd look up another source to get a counter point.

I'm not sure if it's because I'm older and more jaded, or news sources are becoming less information baring and more position pushing, but I am just cutting off my news now.

News aggregators can also just as well inform you as to whether something is bubbling into a major story. I think about any news source and whether they miss something that I want from aggregators, and the answer is often yes.

Obviously the mainstream media will immediately publish a wave of retractions to reflect this because they botched the reporting on this incident.

https://www.reddit.com/r/media_criticism/comments/mmhz7n/dc_...

For weeks they pushed the narrative that "the violent riots at the Capitol resulted in the death of five people." But this is wordplay. One died from being shot. Two died from natural causes. Another died from a drug overdose. And the last died from a stroke. So four of the five deaths were caused by unrelated reasons!

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/04/07/capi...

And the one person who was shot was an unarmed protestor/rioter who was shot by the an unnamed law enforcement officer.

I don't understand.

What I understood is that a number of protesters came armed to the teeth, but nevertheless did not shoot a single bullet even when they were storming the house.

Why did they bring weapons then?

It's almost as if this entire thing was way overblown by the media and there was no plan to overthrow anything.

It was just a big LARP

I think it was obvious there was no plan but I'm not sure you can say it was overblown when people died.

Every statement that the riot caused five deaths is overblown, because four of those were either natural causes or self–inflicted: strokes, heart attack, drug overdose. The fifth was an unarmed protester who was shot by the police.

> because four of those were either natural causes or self–inflicted: strokes, heart attack, drug overdose.

Which most likely would not have occurred if the riot hadn't occurred.

> The fifth was an unarmed protester who was shot by the police.

Yea, I saw the video. While what you've said is technically correct it's borderline simplistic to a fault.

No it's not technically correct, it's just correct. If you ideologically insist on pinning the blame for these deaths on the protesters, then you'll find any logical contortion possible to keep at it, but you'd be simply wrong. Your argument that these deaths wouldn't have occurred if they hadn't shown up is also ridiculous as hell. For one ting because four of the deaths weren't even the result of the protests at at all, and for the last death, You could use the same shitty reasoning for any protest or act of resistance in which people die: "If random people of color just didn't piss off the police, they wouldn't have to get shot by them all the time." Sounds nice and reasonable used in that context too?

Nothing to do with ideology, just the simple fact that once the US Capitol was breached the protestors were committing a criminal act and could be treated as such. Now whether or not that criminal act warranted a firearm discharge is up to debate, but when a large group of people currently breaking the law (and chanting about hanging representatives) are a room or two away from said representatives it's not out of the question that multiple warnings would be acted on.

Watching the video it was clear that the plain clothes officer had his glock out for some time. It was even seen/called out by the rioters. He issued multiple verbal warnings to the rioters, which were ignored by Ashli Babbitt.

>Your argument that these deaths wouldn't have occurred if they hadn't shown up is also ridiculous as hell.

Ashli Babbitt would most likely be alive today if she wasn't in the Capitol on January 6th. That's not only technically correct, it's just correct. ;)

"We didn't intend to overthrow anything. We just wanted to tour the Capitol and they happened to be certifying an election at the time, what's it to you?!?"

lol, that's basically how it looked, funnily enough.

https://www.sakafete.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/maxresde...

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/036/277/mee...

It's almost like there was a mob mentality leading a mob...

Many came prepared with plenty of non-lethal weapons. There's video evidence of the use of bear spray, assault of police officers, and property destruction.

Just because it could have been worse doesn't mean each person shouldn't be held to account.

History will correct the, let's say, heated emotions expressed online, with enough time.

Give it 20 years and you won't care that there was or wasn't an insurrection at all, but the record will correct your emotions if you keep hold of them.

Pepper spray can cause acute rise in blood pressure which can cause blood clots and stroke.

> the autopsy found no evidence the 42-year-old officer suffered an allergic reaction to chemical irritants [...] there was no evidence of internal or external injuries.

What’s your point?

What was your point?

Yeah it can, but it didn’t.

The establishment got what they wanted out of this lie. The truth will now be buried and go largely unexamined.

Currently front page of NYTimes, CNN, WaPo, Fox, WSJ edit: (and Hacker News)

On the (mobile) NYTimes home page it's the 24th story down, and entitled "Officer Attacked During Capitol Riot Died of Multiple Strokes" and redirects to https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/04/19/us/joe-biden-news/ - some sort of political live feed? The Sicknick story is the 6th down in this feed, buried a couple thousand words in. Not exactly the clear and unambiguous retraction I'd expect from a serious newspaper.

It's just as they say, "lies have short legs". The purpose of misinformation is not really to bury the truth forever, as the truth will eventually come out, but to achieve short term goals like getting a desired reaction from people, at which point you don't care anymore if the lie was exposed. Another relevant example is the Hunter story, where the media did a blackout and it was censored off Facebook and Twitter, but after the election they no longer cared and they just admitted it was true.

No, it's long term too, because the retraction doesn't have the same effect as the original. In bayesian terms, it doesn't completely reset peoples' priors.

> The purpose of misinformation is not really to bury the truth forever, as the truth will eventually come out, but to achieve short term goals like getting a desired reaction from people

In some cases. In others the purpose is to flood the zone with so much crap that people mistrust almost everything.

Admitted it was true about Hunter Biden? What?

Also I don’t understand where the lie was? Was it unreasonable to initially report that an officer who died following the chaos had injuries from the event?

It’s fair to criticize the breathless coverage, but isn’t calling it a lie that served its purpose a bit much?

The correction that is supposedly being buried is on the top of Apple News, WaPo and on the front of the NYT.

How many of those stories mentioned that he collapsed in his office, 8 hours after he walked away from the riot?

I was curious so I checked.

CBS, BuzzFeed, NBC, Politico, USA Today, NPR, and WSJ stories mentioned that he died many hours after leaving, most provided exact times.

I gave up after those because it seems this narrative about the truth being buried isn’t turning out to be true.

I decided to check as well.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210108182531mp_/https://www.cn...

Scroll down about three–quarters of the way to find it; the link doesn’t go to just a single article.

“Officer Sicknick was injured while physically engaging with the rioters and collapsed after returning to his division office. "He was taken to a local hospital where he succumbed to his injuries,"”

So it does say that he collapsed in his office, but not that it was 8 hours later, that he walked himself back to his office, nor that he died the next day. It then pads the paragraph out with “Officer Sicknick joined the USCP in July 2008, and most recently served in the Department's First Responder's Unit.”, which is irrelevant information.

I just clicked on the first headline I saw about the “5 deaths”. Maybe there are a dozen others that have more details, but this summary that leaves out everything important was the easiest to find.

Here’s another one that came to my attention:

“He Dreamed of Being a Police Officer, Then Was Killed by a Pro-Trump Mob”

https://web.archive.org/web/20210109011156/https://www.nytim...

“Then on Wednesday, pro-Trump rioters attacked that citadel of democracy, overpowered Mr. Sicknick, 42, and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials. With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support. He died on Thursday evening.”

That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? Surely the hospital could have confirmed or denied that he was bleeding from a head wound when admitted, if they had asked. After all, they claim to have known that he was on life support, so surely they must have asked somebody. Or they could have found out that he was admitted 8 hours later. More likely they just made things up.

They lied that Hunter's laptop was both/either hacked and a Russian misinformation campaign.

The lie about Sicknick was that he was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher.

Who is they?

Do you know what a lie is? Was it a lie when law enforcement speculated that was his cause of death?

Actually, I don't know, you tell me. Who were these supposed law enforcement officials that claimed, I quote, "he was struck in the head with a fire extinguisher and with a bloody gash in his head was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support"? Because that's a lie, he got back to his office and he collapsed there. With no injuries.

And comments citing these facts go transparent.

A pattern of misinformation: Hype the story for months only to quietly retract it after the political gain & social damage takes effect. The government & benefiting organizations will not give up the power granted to it by "temporary" or "emergency" measures during this period of public belief in the misinformation. There may be a "fall guy" if the subsequent public outrage is strong enough. Anybody identifying broader patterns & illicit behavior by authorities & organizations will be labeled a "conspiracy theorist" & ridiculed by the usual suspects.

On sites like Hacker News, the post will be flagged due to it's "politically sensitive" content & not stoking "intellectual curiosity", even though it is interesting & useful knowledge to understand markets, government behavior, where society is going, etc.

I'm not saying that this pattern is being applied today...but it is a security vulnerability that could be easily exploited in our Democratic & public information systems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com