Like iron filings rearranging themselves in the presence of a magnetic field, reflexive apologists for the police quickly adapt to every official explanation for egregious misconduct.
Knowing that official insinuation suffices when facts are
withheld, the
Baltimore PD leaked the suggestion that Gray killed himself by banging
his head on the walls of the vehicle. This account was supposedly provided
by another arrestee during a jailhouse interview with a police detective.
The alleged witness –who had a compelling motive to tell a
story his captors would like -- didn’t
actually see what happened. The detective’s report claims that the witness
heard the sound of Gray frantically striking his head against the inner walls
of the vehicle, as if driven by some perverse instinct to break his own neck.
When coupled with
the unsourced claim that Gray had a pre-existing neck injury (he received a
settlement in a case involving suspected lead poisoning), the
officially promoted narrative indicted Gray as the culprit in his own homicide.
This desperate act, we are told, has been exploited by the Revolutionary Left in its unending campaign to
demonize the police.
“Freddie broke his own neck,” sneered a Baltimore Police
Officer named Avi Tasher in a post on his now-deleted Facebook page (which
was archived for posterity by Photography Is Not A Crime). “Police never
harmed him or denied him medical attention. He was faking injury to delay his
arrest then snapped his own spinal cord in the wagon by smashing his head into
the wall repeatedly. Even the other prisoner gave a statement to that effect.”
In a separate post, Tasher protested that media coverage of Gray’s death –
specifically by CNN – had fomented a “race riot” in Baltimore.
Gray had an extensive arrest record, most of which dealt
with trivial offenses that wouldn’t be considered crimes in a rational society.
The police who arrested him were not acting on a complaint, nor did they
witness him in the act of committing a crime; Gray fled in order to avoid
contact with the police, which
is the reaction of every sensible person who has that option.
After being taken into custody, Gray was not only handcuffed
behind the back, but thrown
face-down into the police van “head first, ankles bound, arms bound,” according
to an eyewitness. En route to the station, and before the unnamed “witness”
was picked up, the police stopped to place more restraints on Gray. At that
point, according to a video record, the victim was conscious and speaking. When
the vehicle arrived at the station a half-hour later, he was unresponsive.
Someone shackled as Gray was would not be able to beat his
head against the wall. Since he was not secured by a seat belt he would likewise
be unable to protect himself against potentially fatal blunt force impacts
against unyielding surfaces as part of a
widely practiced punitive ritual called a “nickel ride,” a “rough ride,” or a “wild
ride.” In many jurisdictions, including Baltimore and Philadelphia, police
are known to subject shackled prisoners to a series of sudden stops, turns, and
accelerations. The practice is well-known, and quietly condoned by the same
police administrators who publicly condemn it.
Dozens of people have suffered significant injuries – including
permanent paralysis – from this variety of police torture. There is no record
of a police officer facing criminal charges, or significant administrative
discipline, for
inflicting a “rough ride” on an arrestee.
Invoking what might be called "Dumb and Dumber" logic -- that is, assuming that we shouldn't definitively rule out something that enjoys an infinitesimal chance of being true -- we could say that it is possible that Gray's fatal injury was self-inflicted. It must be understood that a severed spine is precisely the kind of
trauma a “rough ride” is designed to inflict.
Yet Punitive
Populists and Law-and-Order
Leninists readily embraced the staggeringly implausible claim that Gray,
who was arrested without cause, taken into custody without resistance, and
trussed in the fashion of a game fowl being prepared for the oven, somehow
managed to kill himself by hurling his head against a bolt embedded in the wall
of the police van.
Freddie Gray was hardly the first young black man who supposedly
displayed the flexibility of Reed Richards in killing himself while in police
custody.
According to police in Jonesboro, Arkansas, 21-year-old Chavis Carter shot
himself in the head while
handcuffed in the back seat of a police vehicle during a July 2012 arrest.
Two body searches conducted on the still-living Carter failed to turn up the
gun that was supposedly used in the suicide. Officers Keith Baggett and Ronald
Marsh, who had taken Carter into custody, were placed on paid vacation and
quickly cleared by an internal investigation. A lawsuit filed against the City
of Jonesboro and its police department was deflected
by the predictable
claim of “qualified immunity.”
Carter was apparently the first of several “Houdini suicides”
committed by young men in police custody.
Roughly two years later, 22-year-old Victor White III,
according to the official account offered by the New Iberia, Louisiana Police
Department, replicated
Carter’s feat by shooting himself in the head while in the back of a patrol car.
The original police account claimed that Carter, who somehow managed to find a
gun that eluded the rigorous body search by his conscientious captors, fatally
shot himself in the back. However, the
coroner’s report, which wasn’t released until the fall, concluded that the
fatal wound was inflicted from the front.
White’s hands were never tested for residue, and the wound
displayed none of the “stippling” associated with gunshots delivered at close
range. Despite a welter of contradictions and evidence suggestive of a criminal
homicide, Dr. Carl Ditch ratified the claim that White killed himself.
In November 2014, while White’s family was examining the
freshly released coroner’s report regarding the death of their son, 17-year-old
Jesus Heurta of Durham, North Carolina joined the ranks of handcuffed suspects
who somehow managed to kill themselves in the back seat of police vehicles. Despite a careful and methodical search of
the suspect, who was handcuffed from the back, Huerta retrieved a concealed
handgun and shot himself in the face as
the vehicle was approaching police headquarters – or so the police would later
insist.
“The evidence and information collected thus far indicate
that Mr. Huerta had a handgun concealed on his person,” announced Captain L.J.
Clayton, who presided over what was no doubt a comprehensive and disinterested
internal investigation. Officer Samuel Duncan, who arrested the teenager
following a family dispute, “did not discover this handgun during his search of
Mr. Huerta. Mr. Huerta shot himself with that handgun.”
These findings were presented during a press conference from
which the victim’s family was excluded.
Duncan, a rookie officer who had just finished his
probationary period, reported that Huerta was the first person he had arrested
and placed in his patrol vehicle that evening. The vehicle had been searched
prior to Duncan’s shift. Duncan didn’t find any weapons during his pat-down
search of Huerta. Another teen who was arrested at the same time testified that
Huerta was not armed at the time of the police encounter.
Shortly before arriving at the station, Duncan claims, he
heard a gunshot and leapt from the car out of fear that he might have been targeted.
The unpiloted vehicle remained in gear and eventually collided with a tree. Huerta
was found with a bullet wound to the front of his face. A well-worn .45-caliber
handgun -- the same caliber used by the Durham Police -- was reportedly
discovered at his side.
Huerta was a small, wiry teenager. The gun he purportedly
used to kill himself is a HiPoint
.45, which is bulky and difficult to conceal. Retrieving a gun of that size,
let alone using it to carry out a self-inflicted headshot, would have entailed
flexibility worthy of a Cirque du Soleil performer, and highly visible exertion
of the kind that should have been obvious even to the kind of intellectually
stunted individual who typically chooses a law enforcement career.
As so often happens in cases of this kind, the patrol
vehicle was equipped with a video camera that wasn’t turned on to record the
critical event. The most recent record in a federal firearms database placed
the handgun at a Georgia pawnshop in 1991. This nicely fits the description of a
“drop gun” or a “throw-away weapon” – stolen or confiscated guns used by
police to cover up murders, manufacture pretexts for arrests, or to conceal
other criminal misconduct.
Responding to a timidly skeptical reporter who asked how a
handcuffed man could shoot himself in the face, Deputy Chief Anthony Marsh
displayed a staged photo of a shackled man contorting himself into a position
in which this might be possible.
“Not only can it be done, it has been done in other
jurisdictions,” Marsh insisted. Since this facially ludicrous story had become
validated through repetition, and canonized by the State-aligned media, it was
now simply incontestable that a handcuffed suspect who shows up at the police
station with a fatal bullet wound is a victim of suicide, rather than police
homicide.
This kind of thing is obvious to precisely the same kind of
people – from police
state catamites like Sean Hannity, to others
who should be more sensible -- who want to pretend that Freddie Gray
managed to sever his own spinal cord.
There is an interesting, and very troubling, resonance
between these stories of domestic police torture and the official treatment of
the June 2006 “suicides” of three detainees at Alpha Block of the Guantanamo
Bay prison camp.
Saudi captives Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal
Al-Zahrani, and Yemeni detainee Sala Ahmen Al-Salami had been held at Gitmo for
several years without charges. They had participated in hunger strikes to
protest their illegal detention and the mistreatment they had received.
After their lifeless bodies were found hanging in their
cells, Camp Commandant Harry Harris described the deaths as “suicides” carried
out as “an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” By killing
themselves, the prisoners had actually victimized those who imprisoned them –
or so we were instructed to believe. The official account was verified by the
NCIS, which means that it is to be embraced as the unqualified and unassailable
truth, notwithstanding the fact that it is a demonstrable lie.
“According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had
fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his
cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall,” observes
international human rights attorney Scott Horton. “Each prisoner was able
somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then
stuff more rags deep down his own throat. We are then asked to believe that
each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his
washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the
washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the
three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of
these actions almost simultaneously.”
Simone Weil famously
defined power as a mysterious influence that “turns anybody who is
subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing
in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse into him.”
Out of fear or worship of power, others are eager to retail
even the most obvious lies used to sustain it. People of that description are
quite commonplace in torture states of the kind America has become.
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Dum spiro, pugno!
6 comments:
And I still meet people who like Pavlovs dogs will respond as if on cue to the programming within their noggins when it comes to defending this nonsense.
HiPoint handguns are favorites of the local gang banger crowd where I live-because they are cheap-and work most of the time-this makes them readily available to the local "gang task force" as well.I'm guessing that's the case in most of the country.
The "Mr. Gray beat himself up and severed his own spinal cord" defense is used by cops everywhere,as is the nickel ride-it's a favorite of the stormtroopers-in my younger days,I was treated to one of those rides-I also somehow hit myself repeatedly in the area of my kidneys with a fire extinguisher,then proceeded to hit myself in the face with said fire extinguisher several times-the video camera for the holding cell wasn't working that night for some reason.
The police state needs to be stopped-dismantled piece by piece until it's back to "To Protect and Serve".
It is almost laughable that the Baltimore Police are alleging that this man killed himself in the van. Severing ones own spinal column is Would be very difficult, if it even possible. hopefully the police will be found guilty when the truth eventually comes out.
I am sure they are working overtime to cover up the details of what happened.
Pure evilness right from the playbook of Satin himself. And the worst part about is, it happens in every city to some degree. The people allow it by being "willful idiots" by turning off their own common sense. Ask people if the believe the media and they will say, "no". But when the media slanders someone with lies easy to spot and see through. These Willful Idiost will help gather the wood to burn the establishment's victims at the stake. In the meantime people will keep being murdered because the masses will by far too large in numbers, will roll over and willfully play stupid. Sadly with the world's evilness in our world today, the Willful Idiots are on the list being seen as, useless eaters. That fact demands they be labeled, Willful Idiots. No different than a wolf telling a sheep, that he lovers her and wants to take her to his home so she can meet his parents. She goes along, willingly.
One would think that trying to sever ones spinal cord would be a painful control-able process and at some point one would would say this hurts and is a bad idea and stop it. The police state is alive and well.
After my rough ride in Ayer Ma with Police officer Richard Krasinskas on mass.gov appeals for denial to Worcester Police, I got to see his wife Kerry at Nashoba Valley Medical Center and was denied care. Pinned down for blood draw by her and a male and labs used in Middlesex court. Nice job covering for Hubby.
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