What We Know About Ashli Babbitt's Killer

One thing we know is that Lt. Michael Byrd is now Cpt. Michael Byrd

On January 6, 2021, 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt, a 14-year USAF veteran, entered the Capitol alone through a broken window. The time was 2:23 p.m. What only God knew is that Ashli had 20 minutes left to live. Once in, she encountered a female police officer who directed her towards the House side. As Ashli walked, she saw crowds wandering peacefully through the many rooms and corridors of this vast building. Uniformed police officers looked on, seemingly as clueless and confused as the protestors.

At 2:36, Ashli, now accompanied by citizen journalist Tayler Hansen, walked down the long, narrow corridor leading to the Speaker’s Lobby. Hansen recorded her as she walked. Guarding the lobby doors were three United States Capitol Police (USCP) officers. Hansen offered the officers some water, while Ashli joked with them.

Within a minute or two, the trailing crowd of roughly thirty people quickly filled up the hallway in front of the lobby doors. Appalled by the behavior of a would-be window-breaker, Ashli’s police training kicked in. “Call fucking back-up!” she shouted at the feckless officers as they stood in place with their backs to the doors, doing nothing.

The officers were not in any imminent danger. They appear to have noticed a USCP emergency response team mount the stairs to the lobby and abandoned their post before the response team could reach them. As soon as the officers pulled away, a rioter smashed the windows of the unguarded doors. “Ashli was actively trying to disarm these people,” Hansen observed, “trying to calm them down through this entire kind of confrontation with these police officers.”

By this time, several of the protestors on the left side of the hallway had noticed a weapon leveled parallel to the doors. A few yelled, “gun, gun” or “there’s a gun, there’s a gun.” On the right side of the clamorous lobby, Ashli either did not hear the warning or feared that the gunman was on her side of the lobby doors. After yelling for the window-breaker to stop, Ashli yanked at his backpack with her right hand. As he spun around, she slugged him square in the face with her left fist. His glasses flew off on impact. Fleeing the madness, Ashli hopped into the window frame now fully free of glass. Only a person as small as she could have managed that feat.

USCP Lt. Michael Byrd, the incident commander for the House on January 6, had all the time he needed to assess the scene. He knew that the doors were heavily barricaded and that other armed officers hovered nearby in the Speaker’s Lobby. “Members and staffers were just feet away when Babbitt attempted to climb through a shattered glass,” the House J6 report writers insisted. That was false.

No members of Congress remained in the lobby, and the handful that remained on the House floor were Republicans, four men from Texas, one from Oklahoma. They stood guard at the main door one hundred feet away and calmed the crowd through a broken window. Three dozen House Democrats meanwhile hovered in the balcony, “socially distancing.” Panicked by their own propaganda, they feared the worst. “Just remember, we’re on the right side of history,” Rep. Val Demings told a colleague. “If we all die today, another group will come in and certify those ballots.”

The 800-page House J6 report did not mention Byrd by name, let alone question the shooting. To the degree that the report mentioned Ashli it was to build the specious case that Trump was indifferent to her death. How Byrd came to be there, as incident commander, had a lot to do with the racial politics of DC. Some years back, Byrd fired shots into his own moving vehicle. Some teenagers had stolen it and were fleeing the scene. Not the best of shots, Byrd sent a few stray bullets into the sides of nearby homes. An official investigation ruled that his use of force was unjustified. In another city, the officer gets canned. Not in Washington. Not Byrd.

In 2019, Byrd made the news when he left his Glock .22 in the Capitol Visitor’s Center. As many as twenty thousand people pass through the center on a given day. More troubling still, the Glock does not have a traditional safety. A child could have found it and fired it. According to Roll Call, Byrd told fellow officers, “I will be treated differently.” He was. After the Monday night incident, he was back on the job Tuesday.

The IRS seems to have treated Byrd differently as well. As licensed private investigator Susan Daniels has reported, Byrd owes the IRS $56,365.71 in taxes dating back to 2019. In December 2023, Daniels called Prince George’s County Courts, MD, and confirmed that the money had not yet been paid.

Just seven seconds after she slugged the window-breaker, said Hansen, “Michael Leroy Byrd ended up issuing the kill shot with no verbal warning.” Said Thomas Baranyi, a young protestor who had been right behind Ashli when she fell, “[The protest] was a joke to them until we got inside, and then all of a sudden the guns came out.”

Once shot, Ashli instantly fell backward onto the marble floor. As Ashli lay dying, Byrd wasted no time trying to establish his alibi. Within one minute of shooting Ashli, he made an astonishing radio call: “405B. We got shots fired in the lobby. We got shots shots fired in the lobby of the House Chamber. Shots are being fired at us and we’re sh, uhh, prepared to fire back at them. We have guns drawn. Please don’t leave that end. Don’t leave that end.”

Like the Democrats huddling in the balcony, Byrd had fallen prey to the media scare stories about the MAGA hordes. Less than a minute later, Byrd made a follow-up call: “405B. We got an injured person. I believe that person was shot.” Believe? Indifferent to the possibility that the shooting had been recorded, Byrd reflexively created his own reality. With a history of being “treated differently,” he was confident his version would prevail.

“Protestor” John Earle Sullivan made either option difficult. Sniffing a payday for the footage he shot of Ashli’s death, he had his agent contact CNN on January 6 and enter into a one-week agreement for use of the critical forty-four seconds. CNN paid him $35,000. The network, however, would quickly come to regret this vestigial act of journalism.

After Sullivan appeared with Anderson Cooper, Trump supporters pointed out that Sullivan was a black activist in the BLM mode. A video from his Instagram account, long since deleted, showed him at a Salt Lake City rally in the summer of 2020 telling the crowd, “We gotta fucking rip Trump right outta that office…. No, no—we ain’t’ about waitin’ until the next election, we’re about to go get that motherfucker!” At the Capitol, however, Sullivan played patriot and egged on the crowd. He recorded himself saying, “There are so many people. Let’s go. This shit is ours! Fuck yeah,” and, “Let’s burn this shit down.”

Whatever Sullivan’s motives, his video made life difficult for Byrd and his patrons. To preserve the narrative of heroic Capitol police resisting an insurrectionist mob, Byrd had to be protected. This would not be easy. Byrd violated just about every USCP directive on the use of deadly force.

Masked and out of uniform, Byrd did not identify himself as a police officer, did not give Ashli verbal orders to stop, nor give her a chance to comply. He did not “diligently assess” the situation before firing. He never considered any other defensive tactics or compliance techniques. He disregarded the presence of seven other police officers in his line of fire. And as incident commander for the House, he appeared to have no comprehension of who was in the Speaker’s Lobby or the House Chamber or what was going on around him. Most critically, Ashli did not pose “an imminent danger of death or serious injury.” When Byrd fired, he did not even know she was a female.

“I was bound to the same use of force continuum as the police are in D.C.,” said Ashli’s husband, Aaron Babbitt, of his time working security at a nuclear facility. “I knew it was a bad shoot.” The Epoch Times use-of-force expert Stan Kephart was even more definitive. “Ashli Babbitt was murdered,” said Kephart. “She was shot and killed under the color of authority by an officer who violated not only the law but his oath.” Kephart considered the shooting “an arrestable offense.”

To Byrd’s good fortune, Sullivan’s video only showed the masked Byrd briefly. This gave his patrons time to hide the still unidentified Byrd from public view until they came up with a public relations strategy. For six months, the USCP put Byrd and a pet up in a “distinguished visitor suite” at the “Presidential Inn” on the grounds of Joint Base Andrews.

For nearly nine months after the shooting, the media showed no interest in Byrd’s identity. Not until August 28, 2021, did the Capitol Police publicly identify Byrd by name. Welcoming Byrd with an exclusive interview was Lester Holt, perhaps the most empathetic black newsman in the business. Byrd was well coached. For those who knew nothing of the facts—NBC’s core audience—he came across as bipartisan, patriotic, and sensitive to a fault. Those who knew the facts witnessed a master class in dissembling.

Holt began by asking Byrd why the Capitol Police withheld his name as long as it did.

Byrd responded, “Threats.”

To further insulate Byrd, Holt followed his initial question with the inevitable, “Racist threats?”

Long before internet sleuths even deduced Byrd’s identity, the NBC audience was led to believe Trump supporters were making racist threats. “I do hate that son of a bitch,” said Ashli’s mom, Micki, “not because he’s black, but because he killed my child.”

As Holt repeated twice, the USCP, the Metropolitan DC Police, the FBI, and the DOJ had all cleared Byrd of any wrongdoing. This was true. According to the DOJ, the fact that “an officer acted out of fear, mistake, panic, misperception, negligence, or even poor judgment” did not make him criminally culpable. That officer would have had to act “with a bad purpose to disregard the law.” By this standard, Byrd was at least as guilty as, say, Derek Chauvin or Kim Potter, the Minnesota officer imprisoned for the accidental 2021 shooting of Daunte Wright.

The DOJ publicly cleared Byrd in April 2021—without mentioning his name. What no one could clear him of, especially after his one-time appearance on NBC, was lying. Byrd lied about things big and small, even things he didn’t have to lie about. Most grandiose was his claim, “I know that day I saved countless lives.” Among those he claimed to have saved were members of Congress who were “disabled” or very nearly so. “Some of those individuals were in the lobby with me,” said Byrd. In fact, there were no members of Congress in the lobby, let alone disabled ones.

Not until the twenty-three-minute mark of the interview did either Holt or Byrd mention Ashli by name. Holt asked what Byrd made of the fact that “some have elevated Ashli Babbitt to the status of the martyr.” Replied Byrd, who surely had the questions provided to him in advance, “I have no reaction to that.” Holt then set up Byrd for the interview’s takeaway message, “I just want the truth to be told.” Apparently, Byrd told his truth well enough to please his elite masters. To show their indifference to the truth, they had Byrd promoted to captain two years after the interview.

Meanwhile hundreds of J6ers rot away in prison for their “attack” on law enforcement, an attack that resulted in no greater an injury than a severed finger tip.