MSNBC Couldn't Handle the Truth About January 6

Better to Let the Mystery of Rosanne Boyland's Death Go Unsolved

Without ever intending to be there, 34-year-old Rosanne Boyland found herself caught up in the crowd at the entrance to the Capitol’s west tunnel late on the afternoon of January 6, 2021. When the police made a concerted surge to drive back the protestors—what protestor Kim Sorgente called “a synchronized chemical attack, then a charge”—the protestors tumbled backwards.

The chemical irritant sprayed by the MPD displaced the oxygen in the tunnel, causing people to feel faint. Rosanne collapsed at the tunnel entrance. To Epoch Times reporter Joe Hanneman, the scene looked “like a waterfall going down the steps leading away from this entrance, people just tumbling out.” Boyland found herself at the bottom of the pile.

Once the other protestors were pulled off her, Rosanne lay momentarily lifeless and exposed at the tunnel entrance. Keen on “equity,” the Metropolitan PD apparently thought it only fair to allow a small, slim female the opportunity to man the contested front of a police line. Lila Morris picked up what appears to be a tree branch, raised it up with both hands, and swung wildly. She struck the dead or dying Rosanne over the head at least three times before the branch snapped and flew out of her hands.

“I was horrified,” said the Epoch Times use-of-force expert Stan Kephart upon seeing the video. “We don’t train officers to hit people in the head with a blunt object.” Added Kephart, “It was definitely a crime.”

Other protestors intervened to try to save Rosanne. They removed her from the tunnel entrance and began applying CPR. Failing to revive her after ten minutes, they carried Rosanne back to the entrance in the hope that the police had the resources to revive her. They did not.

With the release of Rosanne’s name the next morning, the media swooped in on the Boyland home in Kennesaw, Georgia. Brother-in-law Justin Cave, the designated family spokesman, blamed Rosanne’s death on President Trump. He then reached out to high school buddy Ayman Mohyeldin, an anchor at MSNBC. The story Cave intended to tell featured Trump as the prince of lies and Rosanne as his innocent victim of Trump and QAnon.

Mohyeldin couldn’t resist. He proceeded to produce a 5-part podcast called “American Radical.” Soon enough, however, he discovered that the plot line he hoped to follow about QAnon’s imagined grip on Rosanne was a red herring. The real story would lead him beyond the MSNBC pale and down a rabbit hole whose end he would never quite reach.

On January 7, the District of Columbia Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), did an autopsy on Rosanne. Heading that office at the time was Dr. Roger Mitchell. When last heard from, Mitchell was threatening to ruin Dr. Andrew Baker’s career unless he amended the autopsy report of George Floyd to include “neck compression,” a necessary corruption if Derek Chauvin were to be accused of murder. (See “The Dems' Chauvin Strategy and How Trump Subverts It.”)

On April 6, 2021, Dr. Joanie Taylor of the OCME called the Boyland family to give a heads-up on the impending release of the autopsy report. The cause of death, said Taylor, was “acute amphetamine intoxication.” Amphetamine was the active ingredient in the Adderall that Rosanne had been taking by prescription for ten years to deal with her ADHD. Not wanting Rosanne to be thought a drug addict, Rosanne’s sister Lonna begged Taylor to at least acknowledge that the drug was prescribed, but that was not part of the OCME’s plan.

Although reluctant to see the larger picture, Mohyeldin was getting a glimpse into the workings of DC justice. He tried reaching out to the MPD homicide unit but got stonewalled. He and his team contacted the OCME several times, hoping to speak to Dr. Taylor or her new boss, Francisco Diaz, but “all our requests were denied.” Lamented the MSNBC anchor, “The trampling, the riot, the video evidence, none of this was even mentioned in the official autopsy report.”

Mohyeldin interviewed Philip Anderson, a black protestor caught in the crush right next to Rosanne. He himself almost died. “When someone is killed,” Anderson told Mohyeldin, “you can’t lie about the cause of death. You can’t hail someone as a hero when they kill someone. You can’t do that.” As Mohyeldin was learning, in Biden-world you can. No one law enforcement entity—not the Capitol Police, not the MPD, not the FBI—ever investigated Rosanne’s brutal death.

In Washington, the medical examiner waited until the very last day of the standard 90-day window for the release of Rosanne’s final autopsy report. It only appeared that Rosanne died “after being caught in a crush of rioters,” reported the New York Times in May 2021. The OCME, the Times added, “did not find evidence of trampling and concluded that she had overdosed on amphetamines.” Once again, the editors honored the final, most essential command of the “Party”: reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.

Mohyeldin and MSNBC had the autopsy and toxicology reports reviewed by an outside expert, Dr. Adele Lewis. She was stunned that the DC medical examiner overlooked the obvious. “As we say,” said Lewis, “context is everything. So when you look at the videotapes and read the eye witness accounts of what happened, it’s pretty clear that she probably was not a drug overdose death. She’s being essentially trampled by several other people.”

Lewis described the likely cause of death as “traumatic asphyxia due to being trampled or pinned under other people.” The irony here is as deep as the deception: Mitchell discounted the drugs in Floyd’s system and accused the Minneapolis cops of killing Floyd by asphyxia. A year later, Mitchell or his office cleared the DC cops of an “asphyxia” charge by blaming Rosanne’s death on drugs. Floyd, of course, was the one whose blood tested positive for fentanyl and methamphetamines. Rosanne tested positive for neither.

Of note, too, the relevant body cam footage in Rosanne’s death was strategically withheld just as it was for Floyd’s. As Mohyeldin admitted, “We requested the officer in question’s body camera footage, but we were denied.” Bret Boyland, Rosanne’s father, applied through the Freedom of Information Act for Morris’s bodycam footage and was denied. In Floyd’s case, the footage would have helped exonerate the cops. In Rosanne’s case, it would have incriminated them, Lila Morris in particular.

The Boylands had come to lose faith in the government. In September 2021, the DOJ released a previously unseen video that confirmed the family’s worst suspicions. “It doesn’t show the police officers helping my sister whatsoever. The only people who are helping her are the guys sitting in jail right now,” said Lonna.

Increasingly frustrated both with the authorities and Mohyeldin, Lonna started talking to the conservative Gateway Pundit, specifically reporter Cara Castronuova. “The Gateway Pundit is asking similar questions to what we’ve been asking: how did Rosanne actually die?” said Mohyeldin, but he clearly did not like the direction Castronuova was taking the investigation.

On his podcast, he replayed an interview of Castronuova on Steve Bannon’s show in which she said, “There’s a 90 percent chance [Rosanne] was killed by police, there’s video out there that shows her being beaten with a stick by a police woman named….” Here, Mohyeldin cut the tape lest his audience hear the name “Lila Morris.” Mohyeldin then did his best to discredit anyone on the right, congressmen included who sought the unvarnished truth of Rosanne’s death.

In the concluding chapter of his 5-part podcast, Mohyeldin met with Lonna for the final time. “Things,” he admitted, “are a little tense.” Although he could not bring himself to say as much, the Boylands no longer trusted his motives. They hoped to learn more about Rosanne’s fate. He wanted to learn more about QAnon.

The podcast series ended inconclusively with him guilt-tripping Rosanne’s sisters for not saving Rosanne from “dangerous conspiracy theories designed to entrap vulnerable people like her.” Three years after the series ended, the Boylands know little more about Rosanne’s death than they did when the series wrapped up.

If the Boyland family had any hope of clearing Rosanne’s name, that hope lay with the House Select Committee. Before finishing its work, the committee would interview more than a thousand witnesses and obtain more than a million documents. The eight-hundred-page final report, released in December 2022, goes into great detail about the two-hour battle for the lower west terrace tunnel, a battle that resulted in one fatality. Curiously, however, the Committee interviewed none of the eyewitnesses to that fatality, not even Lila Morris.

As to the much loved and deeply missed Rosanne Boyland, het name does not appear in the Committee report, not even in the footnotes. As for Lila Morris, she was sent to the 2021 Super Bowl to be honored for her heroism. To date, she has suffered not even a wrist slap.

Each week, as a special bonus for paid subscribers, I will be rolling out in serial form my current book-in-progress: EMPIRE OF LIES: BIG MEDIA’S 30-YEAR WAR ON TRUTH, 1994-2024.