“Say her name.”
That cry from Black Lives Matter and other anti-police activists has been a call to action to memorialize victims and mobilize mobs against police shootings — and yet the name of Ashli Babbitt has not passed their lips.
Despite compelling evidence that the unarmed 35-year-old Air Force veteran was unjustly gunned down by a Capitol Police officer during the Jan. 6 incursion at the U.S. Capitol, Babbit’s death is not featured in the sacred litanies of activists.
And unlike other highly publicized police shootings, the officer remains blissfully anonymous as the Department of Justice announced it did not have sufficient evidence to prosecute the killer cop as they closed the investigation.
Ashli Babbitt’s shooting was officially dismissed and was ignored by the people most vocal about police shootings, but her family is left grappling with the immense pain and loss of such a tragedy.
Her husband, Aaron Babbitt, spoke to Newsmax on April 29 about the stonewalling the family has endured from officials as they pursue a wrongful death claim against Capitol Police, about the last memory of his wife and the utter horror of watching her die on television.
“Without Ashli — that void — it might as well be a giant black hole,” he told “National Report” host Shaun Kraisman.
Kraisman asked Aaron Babbitt what he thought of the fact that the officer would not be prosecuted.
“I personally was already prepared for it,” he said. “If you remember back in January, within a week or two after, it kind of got leaked that they weren’t going to be pressing charges but the investigation was ongoing,” he continued.”So for it to come out three months later, I don’t know what they were doing in between then,” Aaron Babbitt said.
“If they had already made the decision back in January they weren’t going to press charges, they should have just done it then, but just kind of coincidental that also they decided to come up with that last week,” he said.
Kraisman listed off other police shootings that have dominated headlines, alluding to the death of Ma’Khia Bryant who was shot while attempting to stab another girl, and George Floyd, whose death in Minneapolis police custody turned officer Derek Chauvin into a supervillain and household name.
“A lot of it’s caught on camera, the officers either resign or they’re put on administrative leave, and then they’re charged,” the host pointed out. “This is the process that we’ve seen over and over.” Kraisman continued.
“When you watch this, and even as any American has watched, as unfortunate as it is this was all caught on camera. You saw you saw the shooting death of Ashli Babbitt on camera. We still don’t even know who that officer is — were you ever told who this person is?” he asked.
“No,” Aaron Babbitt responded, “we have heard nothing absolutely nothing. It’s been radio silence from
day one.”
The family has only spoken to officials in the department a few times, including when the decision not to press charges was made.
The host pointed out that some families feel closure or relief when “someone paid a price for the crime that was committed” and asked how Aaron Babbitt and his family would feel knowing there was “insufficient evidence” to prosecute in his wife’s case.
“There’s never going to be relief whether he’s charged not,” Aaron Babbitt said.
“I mean, there’s no charges and there’s no amount of money that’s going to bring it’s going to bring our Ashli back to us,” he continued, voice quivering.
“We do want justice for Ashli,” he went on.
“There has to be justice for Ashli and we’re quickly finding out that the Capitol Police department just operates on with full autonomy and basically no rules,” he said.
“And the sad thing on top of that is the same people that are pushing these bills for police reform, they have their own private security in the form of a police department and they’re protecting that officer and they don’t want anything to happen,” Aaron Babbitt charged about the high-profile denizens of Washington D.C.
“It’s just tragedy.”
Aaron Babbitt shared the heartbreaking account of the last time he saw his wife, just one day before her death as she was headed to Washington, D.C. to protest the Electoral College vote certification.
He kissed her goodbye and expressed concern for her safety.
“I told her I loved her and she just looked back at me with her grin,” he recounted, and he told her he had a “bad feeling about this one,” but that he always worried about her.
However, his fears would be confirmed as his wife would die from a gunshot wound inflicted by an officer while she attempted to climb through a broken window inside the Capitol building where lawmakers were fleeing during the incursion.
While others shot by police are mentioned frequently in the media — even as some of them have lost their lives while not cooperating with police — Ashli Babbitt’s final moments caught on camera are not compelling to that same media.
“It’s a very helpless feeling watching her die on TV,” Aaron Babbitt said. “That’s what happened.”
Ashli Babbitt made a choice to trespass at the U.S. Capitol that day and lost her life, but she was shot by an officer despite being unarmed.
Rather than stick to their usual outrage about an incident like that, Democrats instead were eager to use the entire incident to launch a vendetta against former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
They didn’t care that a veteran lost her life at the hands of a police officer because she was a white Trump supporter.
There’s little question that Ashli Babbitt would still be alive but for her decision to storm the Capitol that day, but there’s also a chance the officer shot her without sufficient justification.
The public needs complete transparency from police departments, and any incident that involves the death of an unarmed suspect at the hands of an officer deserves proper scrutiny outside of the department.
Unfortunately, everything surrounding Ashli Babbitt’s death and the entire Capitol incursion has been so politicized and polarized that nothing about the events was fairly examined or prosecuted.
It’s not that Ashli Babbitt’s was the only police shooting that was possibly unjustified, but it’s that hers has never been given the same scrutiny or publicity that others have.
Aaron Babbitt is justifiably angry — and the rest of America should be angry too.
Story cited here.
