The Senate on Tuesday held a hearing on what caused the tragic Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
While the search for an answer as to how the mob breached the building continues, authorities still refuse to address one of the most critical questions that remain.
What killed Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick?
Those who know won’t say. But on Monday, the late officer’s own mother put the dominant narrative of the past seven weeks to rest.
Sicknick’s death, which occurred the day after the riot, gave cynical Democrats a key talking point to try to paint all Republicans as being in league with the mob.
The cynicism was on full display three weeks ago, when Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi allowed Sicknick to become the fifth person to lie in state at the Capitol Rotunda. Receiving that honor, he joined the Rev. Billy Graham, civil rights icon Rosa Parks and two other Capitol Police officers who were murdered in a 1998 shooting.
Suddenly, Democrats who had not shown one iota of concern for the more than 2,000 police officers injured during last year’s George Floyd riots tried to position themselves as the party of law and order.
The problem with that narrative, however, is Sicknick.
For weeks after the riot, he was held up as a martyr – which he became after The New York Times, CNN and other liberal news outlets reported the pro-Trump mob beat him to death with a fire extinguisher.
Typical was the Feb. 2 headline on NPR’s website: “Brian Sicknick, Capitol Police Officer Slain By Mob, Lies In Honor In Rotunda.” Such headlines provided Democratic House impeachment managers dramatic fodder in the case against former President Donald Trump.
Yet that wasn’t true.
And the Sicknick death tale unraveled a little more on Monday.
The Daily Mail reported that Sicknick’s 74-year-old mother, Gladys, “was unequivocal in her assertion that Officer Brian Sicknick was not struck on the head and that as far as the family knows her son had a fatal stroke.”
“He wasn’t hit on the head, no,” she told the Daily Mail. “We think he had a stroke, but we don’t know anything for sure.”
“We’d love to know what happened.”
As the Daily Mail noted, “In the six weeks since his death the truth has taken a backseat to the myth of the brutal attack.”
The paper pointed out that within 48 hours of the riot, Sicknick’s family told two separate media agencies that Sicknick was not initially taken to the hospital, something the Daily Mail confirmed with the head of D.C.’ emergency medical services and that he had suffered a blood clot on the brain, and had a stroke.
Yet, the Daily Mail pointed out, “these few publicly available facts were bulldozed over by political fervor and it was the unattributed account of a brutal attack, also reported by the Associated Press, that gained traction.”
“Less than 24 hours after his death, with no autopsy, no confirmation of any sign of blunt trauma, no investigation nor due process, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for the perpetrators of Sicknick’s ‘attack’ to be brought to justice and vowed, ‘We will not forget.’”
“Despite the family’s earnest desire to the contrary, Sicknick’s death was politicized and seized on as an exemplar of all of the savagery of the pro-Trump mob’s assault on the temple of American democracy.”
Grandstanding lawmakers continued that on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Gladys Sicknick told the Daily Mail, “It’s very hard not knowing [what happened] but we have to wait for a finding just like everybody else.”
Except, of course, for media who must rush to prop up a narrative.