On Oct. 3, 2013, a 34-year-old unarmed black mother, Miriam Carey, was shot dead by U.S. Capitol Police in Washington, D.C.
But there were no cries of racism from the civil-rights community.
There were no brash denunciations of the police from the likes of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson.
There were no protesters marching in the streets.
Just a coverup by YOUR government.
by Paul Bremmer
WASHINGTON – On Oct. 3, 2013, a 34-year-old unarmed black mother and dental assistant with no criminal record, Miriam Carey, was shot dead by U.S. Capitol Police in Washington, D.C. in her own car with her child still in the car seat.
But there were no cries of racism from the civil-rights community.
There were no brash denunciations of the police from the likes of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson.
There were no protesters marching in the streets.
The national media breifly reported the story and then moved on within about 24 hours.
However, Garth Kant, Washington bureau chief, did not move on.
He spent months digging into the story and eventually discovered it had been widely mischaracterized in the media. He lays out all his findings in the brand-new book “Capitol Crime: Washington’s Cover-up of the Killing of Miriam Carey.”
“Remember how they called for civil-rights violation investigations in Ferguson and with Trayvon [Martin]?” Kant asked host Susan Knowles on a recent episode of “Stand for Truth Radio.” “In Ferguson they sent, what was it, 500 FBI investigators and launched their own federal investigation. Of course it came up with nothing, and the only thing they could say was, well, there’s still troubles in the department; that’s why it needs their help of federal guidelines and they need to reform their department, even though the officer did nothing wrong.
“In the case of Miriam Carey, [Eric] Sanders, the [Carey family] lawyer, has tried on more than one occasion to first get Eric Holder and then Loretta Lynch to look into this for possible civil-rights violations, and he has never gotten a word back from them.”
Nor did the ACLU show interest in standing up for Carey’s civil liberties. Kant said no one from the organization was available to comment on the Carey case when he called them.
The unfortunate thing is Kant’s reporting has revealed Miriam Carey was less deserving of her fate than higher-profile black victims such as Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, yet she garnered less national sympathy than they did.
Kant became involved in this case because he happened to be working near the scene of Miriam Carey’s fateful confrontation that day. He was sitting in the cafeteria of the Third District federal courthouse finishing up a story when all of a sudden “it seemed like every police car in the world just streamed by in front of the window and then headed up Constitution [Ave.], so it was obvious there was something major going on,” he told Knowles.
A quick Internet search told Kant there had been shots fired on Capitol Hill. So he packed up his things and headed outside, walking about two blocks to reach the police line, where a crowd was already gathering. He saw a mangled police cruiser sitting in the road. However, none of the officers on the scene had any information on what had happened.
Kant managed to find two witnesses who said they had seen police chase a black car around Garfield Circle, which is directly in front of the U.S. Capitol, before the car headed up Constitution Ave.
After a couple hours, police held a press conference near the scene of the crash and offered more information.
“When the police came out, they told us that somebody had tried to breach security at the White House, that they had rammed the barricade, that they weren’t sure yet, but they think shots might have been fired at the White House, the suspect fled, led cops on a high-speed chase,” Kant relayed. “None of that turned out to be true, but that was the story that everybody reported that day.” All lies.
Kant’s subsequent research revealed a clearer picture of how Miriam Carey ended up dead in her car in the streets of Washington that day. Carey, who lived in Stamford, Connecticut, had a couple days off from work and decided to strap her 13-month-old daughter into the back seat of her car and take off for Washington, D.C. She didn’t tell her mother, sisters or any of her coworkers what she was doing.
Carey had never done anything like this before, although she had been treated for post-partum depression. This led to widespread speculation that she must have been crazy, but Kant reported her symptoms had long since gone away and her family, friends and coworkers all said she seemed normal.
There was no sign of an argument or any incident that may have caused her to take a long drive. Her family and friends didn’t have the slightest inkling anything was wrong with Carey; she seemed happy with her life and her career.
When Carey arrived in D.C., she drove up to a guarded White House entrance, but the guards on duty did not seem to notice her. The first thing she did, according to Kant, was make a U-turn around the guard post to try and leave, which suggested she had turned into the entrance by accident.
The guards, however, tried to stop her from leaving, which is illegal. An off-duty Secret Service agent who happened to be walking by saw the commotion and dragged a metal gate in front of Carey’s car to try and stop her. She tried to drive around it, but the officer dragged it in front of her again. He never identified himself to Carey as a Secret Service agent and he was in plain clothes.
As Carey tried to maneuver around the barrier, she tapped the edge of the gate, and it swung around and knocked the agent down, according to the police report Kant viewed.
“Then, according to witnesses at the scene, rather than fleeing, as police have said and as the U.S. attorney and Department of Justice have maintained… the first thing she did was stop at a red light,” Kant told Knowles. “Then she proceeded normally into traffic.”
The U.S. attorney’s report said Carey then led officers on a high-speed chase of 60 to 80 mph. However, Kant noted it took Carey four minutes to get from the White House to the Capitol, meaning she could have only been traveling about 20 mph. Kant also examined traffic camera video of the moments Carey would have been racing down Pennsylvania Ave. toward the Capitol, but he saw no high-speed chase.
“So it appears she didn’t try to breach security, she did not ram a gate, she did not run over an officer, she did not flee, and she did not lead them on a high-speed chase,” Kant concluded.
When Carey got to Garfield Circle, she drove around the circle and stopped facing the Capitol. Several police vehicles pulled up around Carey’s care, but they did not block her in.
“What happened there is perhaps the most inexplicable part, because they surrounded her with guns drawn and were ordering her to stop, and why she didn’t stop nobody knows, and that can only be a matter of conjecture,” Kant said. “I’ve got to suspect it was panic. You can only imagine she didn’t know what was going on.”
At any rate, Carey drove onto the sidewalk to escape the officers. For reasons unknown, according to Kant, they shot at her. This was in a heavily trafficked area with many pedestrians; it was near a parking lot, a Metro station and the Rayburn House Office Building and a thirteen month old child in the car.
Kant noted there had been a mass shooting at Washington’s Navy Yard only two weeks earlier, so D.C. police were most likely still on edge. Eric Sanders, the Carey family’s attorney, believes the officers panicked and were incompetently trained, according to Kant.
“I think the best educated guess was that it was a combination of miscommunication, incompetence and overzealousness,” Kant offered.
Hers was the black life that didn’t matter.
Police fired eight bullets at Carey’s car, but she drove up Constitution Ave. toward the Capitol. She ran into a pop-up Capitol Police barricade outside the Hart Senate Office Building. Kant noted the police were on shaky legal footing here.
“It violates the Secret Service and Capitol Police policies on vehicle pursuits,” he said. “You’re only supposed to arrest a suspected felon, and you’re not supposed to endanger the public. The public had already had shots fired in its direction. A Capitol Police cruiser had already hit one of the pop-up barriers and he had to be airlifted to the hospital. It was already a dangerous situation. She wasn’t accused of any felonies; she wasn’t even accused of crimes. Reckless driving was all they could cite.”
At the pop-up barrier, Carey backed up and tried to drive over a median to escape. A police cruiser boxed her in from the front, and she tried to back up. That’s when an officer in front of her and another one from her side unleashed a hail of bullets. Every shot that hit Carey hit her in the back or side, including the one that struck her head and killed her.
According to Kant, none of the five witnesses who saw the fatal shooting said Carey was driving at any officers or threatening them in any way. The officer who shot Carey from behind said he shot because he feared for his life. However, Kant pointed out the fatal shot came in from the side, so the officer would not have been in danger of being run over when he shot Carey.
Kant stressed police had no prior knowledge of Miriam Carey before this incident. She wasn’t a terrorist, she wasn’t part of any larger criminal organization, and she was not a wanted woman. She was just an ordinary suburban mother. When a local newspaper entered her license plate number into a criminal database, nothing came up on her.
And yet, there was no national outcry over the slaughter of this unarmed black woman who did not appear to threaten police officers. The nascent Black Lives Matter movement did not protest Carey’s death. Kant contacted representatives of both Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and explained his findings on the case. Both representatives said the Carey case sounded interesting and asked for more information. Kant sent them more information, but he never heard back from either.
“The only thing I can think is that with the other black people in the news who have been shot by officers, those shootings were all local police,” Kant surmised. “These were federal officials. These were Obama’s Secret Service and the U.S. Capitol Police.”
Susan Knowles, the host, deduced Sharpton’s cozy relationship with the Obama administration probably prevented him from denouncing two federal law enforcement agencies, including one that works directly for the executive branch.
“I can see with Al Sharpton, with his relationship with this administration, I can see why he doesn’t want to make waves, and that’s probably why he didn’t follow up on it,” Knowles said. “It wasn’t a state he could go in and get money from, which is what he does.”
Kant agreed: “The racial bias narrative doesn’t work in this instance, because then you’d be accusing Obama’s government of racial bias.”
Kant noted one ironic element of this case.
“In the wake of incidents like Ferguson and Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner… the call has been for a standardization of police standards nationally, based on the federal model,” he noted. “And the problem for those advocates with Miriam Carey is if this is an example of federal policing, how is it that we want this taught nationwide? Because what happened to her seems to be a prime case of overzealousness and/or incompetence, because it just wasn’t handled well.”
Kant said he is now trying to obtain a 92-page memo containing findings and conclusions of the Justice Department on the Miriam Carey case. This memo, which Kant called “the holy grail of this case,” would contain the reasons why they chose not to file criminal charges against the officers.
When Kant considers how Secret Service agents did not shoot an armed intruder who jumped the White House fence and ran into the White House, the cops’ reaction to the unarmed Miriam Carey seems far too harsh.
“What they should have done, and I think they know it, is just let her go,” the author proclaimed.
Kant noted Carey was never accused of any crimes. When the police got a search warrant to search her apartment after they killed her, the only crime they cited was a statute they said was assault on an officer, but in reality was simply assault. The Carey family attorney told Kant they likely did that because they knew they could not credibly accuse her of assaulting an officer.
“So the whole thing was just very shady and dubious, and honestly, I think they know they screwed up royally, and that’s why they clamped down on it.”
Virginia Patriot 1776 