Weeks after Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick died, a wall of silence around the incident has kept his family from knowing the truth, according to his mother.
Sicknick responded to the Jan. 6 incursion into the Capitol. He died the next day under circumstances that, his family says, are not what the public has been led to believe.
House Democrats have used the tragic death of the 42-year-old as a political pawn, writing in the House impeachment report as fact, “The insurrectionists killed a Capitol Police officer by striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher.”
Gladys Sicknick, 74, said she is sure that is not true, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
“He wasn’t hit on the head, no. We think he had a stroke, but we don’t know anything for sure. We’d love to know what happened,” she said.
The official Capitol Police statement about Sicknick’s death said that he “passed away due to injuries sustained while on-duty.” The report said he “was injured while physically engaging with protesters. He returned to his division office and collapsed.”
Amid an official statement void of details, media accounts emerged that Sicknick was hit on the head with a fire extinguisher.
Douglas Buchanan, the chief of communications for D.C.’s Department of Fire and Emergency Medical Services, told the Daily Mail that Sicknick was not “rushed to hospital” from the Capitol.
But even as the tale about the fire extinguisher made its way into the official narrative, the family was telling the news outlet ProPublica a very different account.
Ken Sicknick, the officer’s brother, said Brian Sicknick had communicated with his family and never mentioned a fire extinguisher attack.
“He texted me last night and said, ‘I got pepper-sprayed twice,’ and he was in good shape,” Ken Sicknick said. “Apparently he collapsed in the Capitol and they resuscitated him using CPR.”
Family members were told the day after the incursion that the officer had a blood clot, suffered a stroke and was on a ventilator.
“We weren’t expecting it,” the brother said.
“He ended up with a clot on the brain,” Charles Sicknick, the fallen officer’s father, told Reuters. “If they had operated on him, he would’ve become a vegetable.”
Brian Sicknick’s mother said that the family does not understand how her son could text them that he was feeling fine and be on life support hours later.
Gladys Sicknick also said that putting her son in the middle of a partisan battle was doing nothing to help the family.
“It hasn’t helped, no,” she told the Daily Mail. “It’s very hard not knowing [what happened] but we have to wait for a finding just like everybody else.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.