We can acknowledge the traumatic events of that day — and the role they might’ve played in some officers’ later deaths — without bending the truth.
We can acknowledge the traumatic events of that day — and the role they might’ve played in some officers’ later deaths — without bending the truth.
T here are few jobs as stressful and emotionally wrenching as being a police officer. As I’ve sadly had occasion to observe before, that is why the police-suicide rate is markedly higher than the suicide rates in other professions.
It would also be hard to imagine a more draining experience, physically and emotionally, for a police officer than that of being overmatched while under siege by hundreds of rioters as they storm a building that you’re duty bound to protect — putting your life on the line to save the lives of others.
When a cop commits suicide soon after such an event, it is reasonable to suppose that the stress of the job was a contributing factor. Yet committing suicide after the traumatic event is not the same thing as being killed in the line of duty during the traumatic event. Naturally, if there is any question requiring this distinction to be drawn, the loved ones and admirers of a police officer who has committed suicide will be powerfully motivated to resist the distinction. But the distinction is real.
We must address this discomfiting topic for two reasons.
First, President Biden, his administration, congressional Democrats, their media allies, the chairman of the House Committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot, and a police officer called to testify about his harrowing experience defending the Capitol, have made inflated claims about people — and, in particular, police officers — losing their lives in the mayhem of that day. The Capitol riot will go down as a disgraceful event in American history. But that fact should not grant a political license to exaggerate it into something even worse than what it was.
The number of police killed in the line of duty on January 6 is zero. Only one person is known to have been killed during the riot: Ashli Babbitt, a rioter who was shot dead by a Capitol Police officer. Three other rioters died during the riot, but they were not killed. While initial reports indicated that Roseanne Boyland was trampled to death in a crush of fellow rioters who were trying to push through a police barrier, the medical examiner found that she died of accidental acute amphetamine intoxication. Rioters Kevin Greeson and Benjamin Phillips both appear to have died of cardiovascular disease, which may have been exacerbated by the excitement and violence.
Five police officers who defended the Capitol during the riot died in the days, weeks, and months after it ended.
Brian Sicknick, whose death we have covered extensively at NR, perished the day after the riot from natural causes — he had two strokes, according to the medical examiner. Like scores of other police on duty January 6, he is known to have been subjected by the rioters to assault, including toxic-aerosol spraying, but he appeared to be in good condition back at his headquarters afterward. Though prosecutors have charged two rioters with assaulting him, the charges do not even mention his death, much less allege that the defendants caused it. While it was initially claimed in media reports (and in the House Democrats’ impeachment pleadings) that Sicknick was killed by blunt-force trauma, this was a false allegation. It is far from inconceivable, of course, that the riot could have contributed in some way to bringing on his strokes, but that has never been established.
Four other police officers who defended the Capitol during the riot have committed suicide. Capitol Police officer Howard Liebengood reportedly took his own life on January 10, four days after the riot. D.C. Metro Police officer Jeffrey Smith, whom we will be discussing further, committed suicide five days later. Two other officers of the D.C. Metro Police Department, Kyle deFreytag and Gunther Hashida, committed suicide months later, in July 2021.
These losses of life are tragic. The physical and mental toll of the Capitol riot may have factored into the anxiety and depression that induced the suicides, especially in the cases of those officers who killed themselves just days afterward. We should honor their heroic service on January 6. But they did not die in the line of duty, and it is a disservice to the memory of police officers who actually have been killed in the line of duty to say otherwise.
That brings us back to Officer Jeffrey Smith, whose suicide on January 15, 2021, is the second and more immediate reason for discussing this uncomfortable topic.
Officer Smith was apparently injured during the riot, but he was soon cleared to return to work. The day that was supposed to happen, he shot himself in the head. He was found in his Ford Mustang, which had rolled over and down an embankment along the George Washington Parkway, off the Potomac River.
Yet media reporting is now portraying his suicide as a line-of-duty death — the “line of duty” being his service during the Capitol riot, nine days earlier. As NBC News puts it in a headline, “D.C. police officer’s suicide after Jan. 6 riot declared line-of-duty death.”
“Declared” by whom? As we dig into the story, we learn that this finding was made by the D.C. Police and Firefighters’ Retirement and Relief Board. This is a bureaucracy of the District of Columbia’s government that deals with benefits and insurance-coverage issues for police and firefighters. It is not the D.C. Metro Police Department itself. It is not an investigative agency or prosecutor’s office that has the authority to allege that Officer Smith was killed in the line of duty. Nor has any such agency or office formally accused anyone, criminally or civilly, of killing Officer Smith while he was in the line of duty.
In the end, this is a story about insurance coverage. In that context, no one with a shred of human compassion would object to what the Board has done. If it were not for the political use that has been made of the Capitol riot, the Board’s decision would best go unnoticed — but, of course, the political determination to exaggerate the lethality of the riot is real, so it can’t go unnoticed.
As if it were not heartbreaking enough that her husband died in shocking circumstances at the age of 35, Erin Smith subsequently learned, while waiting on line at a pharmacy, that she was no longer covered by her late husband’s medical insurance. Apparently in accordance with its legal conditions, the coverage terminated because Jeffrey Smith died by his own hand, and not while performing his duties. Not surprisingly, this awful development agitated some powerful people who were already outraged over the riot, including Senators Tim Kaine (D., Va.) and Tammy Duckworth (D., Ill.) and Representative Don Beyer (D., Va.). When Erin Smith filed a claim with the Retirement and Relief Board for full death benefits including insurance coverage, she had those Democratic lawmakers’ strong endorsement.
The Board has now agreed to deem Smith’s death a line-of-duty incident. That conclusion means his widow qualifies for full death benefits. NBC reports that, in a letter the network has reviewed, the Board wrote: “Based on evidence submitted by the petitioner and the Department, we find that Officer Smith sustained a personal injury on January 6, 2021, while performing his duties,” and that this injury “was the sole and direct cause of his death” (emphasis added).
There is video evidence that Officer Smith was assaulted at least twice during the riot — including being struck with what NBC describes as a “flying metal pole.” His wife says he was in pain and not himself in the days after the riot. Nevertheless, the Metro Police had cleared him to return to work on January 15, the day he ultimately took his own life.
D.C.’s former chief medical examiner speculated to NBC that, because Smith had no prior history of mental-health problems, there must have been “a direct cause-and-effect relationship” between the “line-of-duty work trauma” he suffered on January 6 and his death nine days later. For argument’s sake, let’s stipulate that that is true. Whatever this “relationship” was, it is simply not possible that any injury Smith sustained on January 6 was the “sole and direct cause of his death,” as the Board found. There is no publicly known evidence that any injury he suffered at the riot would have killed him. It is abundantly clear, though, that the direct cause of his death was the bullet that he fired.
That bullet was not fired when he was in the line of duty. We may grant that Smith, like most police officers who’ve been on the job for any length of time, experienced horrifying things, including what he went through on January 6. We may even grant that in Smith’s case, those experiences contributed to the downward spiral that ended in his tragic suicide. But we shouldn’t pretend that he died in the course of doing his job.
We can and should feel great sympathy for the Smith family. Under these excruciating circumstances, I am glad his wife is getting full death benefits. Still, police who are killed by criminals, or who otherwise die on the job while risking their lives to serve and protect the public, deserve a special place of honor. So while we should mourn Officer Jeffrey Smith, and be grateful for the dozen years of service he provided the public up through the Capitol riot, we should also acknowledge that he did not die, as these other cops have, in the line of duty.