Contrary to exaggerated, partisan rhetoric that frames the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riot as a “deadly insurrection,” the truth is that only one homicide occurred that day. The victim, an unarmed Trump supporter, was shot and killed by a police officer with a history of irresponsible handling of firearms, who opted against a nonlethal response to an act of trespassing, and who fired his weapon in the absence of any imminent threat of death or serious injury to himself or others in his vicinity.
U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) Lieutenant Michael Byrd’s killing of Ashli Babbitt came just six months after George Floyd’s death under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, an incident that sparked outrage, widespread calls for police reform, and nationwide rioting. In the case of Babbitt’s killing, however, the collective reaction from the American left and major media at best amounted to an indifferent shrug. Worse, many reflexively heralded Byrd as a hero and viewed Babbitt as a deserving recipient of the bullet that perforated her trachea and lung.
The contrast illustrates how partisan framing short-circuits people’s ability to uniformly and objectively apply principles to the facts before them. Put another way, an intellectually honest person can reject Babbitt’s politics, condemn her unlawful conduct on January 6 and rightly conclude that she was the victim of an unjustified police shooting.
In 2021, the Department of Justice announced it had completed an investigation of the shooting and found “insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution.” The DOJ did not, however, assert that Byrd’s use of deadly force was warranted. Last year, Babbitt’s husband filed a civil suit against the federal government, seeking $30 million in damages; the trial is slated to commence in July 2026.
Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran from San Diego who operated a pool business with her husband, attended the “Save America” rally in Washington on January 6 before joining others who proceeded to the Capitol grounds. After things escalated and rioters breached the Capitol building, she entered it, and a female police officer reportedly instructed her to walk toward the House side of the complex.
Here’s how the DOJ described what happened next; I’ve bolded three words I’ll address shortly:
Ms. Babbitt was among a mob of people that…gained access to a hallway outside “Speaker’s Lobby,” which leads to the Chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives. At the time, the USCP was evacuating Members from the Chamber, which the mob was trying to enter from multiple doorways. USCP officers used furniture to barricade a set of glass doors separating the hallway and Speaker’s Lobby to try and stop the mob from entering the Speaker’s Lobby and the Chamber, and three officers positioned themselves between the doors and the mob.
Members of the mob attempted to break through the doors by striking them and breaking the glass with their hands, flagpoles, helmets, and other objects. Eventually, the three USCP officers positioned outside the doors were forced to evacuate. As members of the mob continued to strike the glass doors, Ms. Babbitt attempted to climb through one of the doors where glass was broken out. An officer inside the Speaker’s Lobby fired one round from his service pistol, striking Ms. Babbitt in the left shoulder, causing her to fall back from the doorway and onto the floor.
Though it’s not narrowly relevant to Byrd’s decision to pull the trigger, the DOJ’s passive-tense claim that the three officers on Babbitt’s side of the doors “were forced to evacuate” is important because it indicates an extreme inclination to put the best spin possible on officers’ decisions. Video shows those three officers failing to make any meaningful effort to stop those who were hammering the glass doors. After enduring mounting verbal abuse and violations of their personal space, they simply walked away from the doors, clearing the way for the rioters to remove the glass from a side window and for Babbitt to proceed through the opening.
According to the 32-page complaint filed in the civil suit, one of those three officers later told investigators, “I grapple with this, you know, if I should’ve stayed.” More pointedly, one of the members of the Containment and Emergency Response Team (CERT) who ascended the stairs from behind the mob told investigators, “I was thinking why, why the fuck did they leave?”
Some of the most damning information in the civil complaint comes from Byrd’s own mouth. In a 2021 NBC interview conducted by an excessively sympathetic Lester Holt, Byrd said:
- “I could not see exactly what was happening [on the other side of] the door…it’s impossible for me to see what’s on the other side because we had created such a barricade—it was high enough that the visibility was impossible.”
- “[Babbitt’s] failure to comply required me to take the appropriate action to save the lives of members of Congress and myself and my fellow officers.”
- “It was later [that] I found out that the subject did not have a weapon, but there was no way to know that at that time, and I could not fully see her hands or what was in the backpack or what the intentions [were].”
- “Of course we had our weapons drawn as part of our training. You had [false reports of] shots fired onto the House floor, you’re trained to take a tactical defensive position and prepare for the threat.”
There are many unsettling things about Byrd’s statements, chief among them his admission that he saw no weapon in Babbitt’s hands, and had “no way to know” if she was armed or what her intentions were.
