The US Attorney for Washington DC has launched a federal excessive force investigation into the death of the Trump-supporting Air Force veteran who was shot dead when rioters breached the US Capitol.
The office of Michael Sherwin, the Acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia, confirmed a formal probe is underway into the shooting death of 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt, according to the New York Times.
Sherwin has assigned his civil rights division to lead the case, which is currently under investigation by both the FBI and the DC Metropolitan Police Department.
Babbit, from San Diego, was shot in the chest by a Capitol police officer while she tried to climb through a window into the congressional chambers as part of the violent mob that broke into the Capitol Wednesday.
She died in hospital several hours later.
The cop who fired the fatal bullet, who has not been identified, was put on leave this week pending the investigation.
A Justice Department spokesperson told the Times the investigation into Babbitt’s death is just ‘routine’ and a standard procedure for when an officer uses lethal force.
It will determine whether the officer used ‘excessive force’ against her.
However confirmation of the ‘routine’ investigation has drawn yet more unfavorable parallels between the handling of Wednesday’s riot of predominantly white demonstrators and the treatment of black people at the hands of law enforcement.
Numerous public figures – including President-elect Joe Biden – have pointed to the stark difference in treatment of the white mob compared to the treatment of Black Lives Matter supporters in the streets of DC last year.
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Many have said that, had Wednesday’s mob been largely black, cops would have used greater force and discharged their firearms more readily.
Now, the launch of an excessive force probe into a white female mob member’s death within days of the shooting is likely to exacerbate these observed differences.
Back in March, Daniel Prude, a 41-year-old black man, died after cops placed a spit hood over his head and pressed his face into the ground for two minutes in Rochester, New York, while he appeared to be suffering a psychotic episode.
But it took until September for the New York State Attorney General’s Office to launch an investigation into his death and for the officers involved to be suspended. This came when his family released footage of the incident to the public.
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Elijah McClain, an unarmed black 23-year-old, was stopped by police as he walked down the street, placed in a chokehold and injected with the powerful sedative ketamine in Denver in August 2019.
He died days later but no charges were brought against officers and it wasn’t until the following June, amid a nationwide reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s death, that the Attorney General was appointed to the case.
It was a similar story when 25-year-old black man Ahmaud Arbery was shot dead by former cop Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son Travis McMichael, 34, while out jogging on February 23.
The killers evaded prosecution for more than two months, after the father and son team claimed they thought Arbery was a burglar and that he attacked them when they tried to make a citizen’s arrest, before finally being arrested in May when footage showed the younger McMichael gunning Arbery down.
Shocking footage from Wednesday’s siege shows Babbitt and other rioters trying to force their way through double doors that were barricaded by law enforcement as lawmakers fled to safety and overwhelmed officers grappled to keep the angry mob at bay.
The mob was seen smashing windows and pushing at the doors while armed officers stood guard with their guns drawn on the other side.
Babbitt was then seen trying to clamber through a smashed window to enter the chamber as a fellow rioter shouted ‘he’s got a gun’.
A single gunshot then rung out and the 35-year-old fell back out from the window onto the ground.
Officers were later seen tending to the bleeding woman on the floor of the Capitol building before she was taken to hospital where she succumbed to her injuries later that day.
Babbitt’s husband has paid tribute to his wife, who served 14 years in the Air Force, as a staunch Trump supporter who was ‘a great patriot to all who knew her.’
In an interview with The Sun on Friday, her friend Jack Feeley described her death as an ‘execution’ and said she would have been ‘furious’… (Read more)
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