One wonders what thoughts passed through the fevered mind of Officer Lila Morris as she struck the seemingly lifeless Rosanne Boyland over the head with a branch, then struck her again, and then struck her a third time so hard that the branch snapped in half.
If Morris thought Boyland a hateful white supremacist who deserved her fate, one could, if not forgive her, at least understand how she came to think that way. For the last two years, Morris had heard little else about these MAGA minions and the monster who led them.
President-elect Joe Biden had set the tone when he launched his presidential campaign in April 2019, implying President Donald Trump had called the neo-Nazis involved in the Charlottesville dust-up “very fine people.” No major candidate has ever begun a presidential campaign with a more divisive and slanderous opening gambit (one that Snopes conceded was false just this past week).
Biden continued the slander throughout the campaign. Just four weeks before the 2020 election, he weighed in on the well-timed bust of an FBI-massaged plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. “There is a through line from President Trump’s dog whistles and tolerance of hate, vengeance, and lawlessness to plots such as this one,” fumed Biden. “He is giving oxygen to the bigotry and hate we see on the march in our country.”
If Morris feared the depredations of these Hun-like hordes, she was in good company.
“Just remember, we’re on the right side of history,” Rep. Val Demings told a colleague as they huddled fearfully in the House gallery on January 6.
“If we all die today, another group will come in and certify those ballots.”
“White supremacy and patriarchy are very linked in a lot of ways,” congressional drama queen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told CNN’s Dana Bash.
“There’s a lot of sexualizing of that violence. And I didn’t think that I was just going to be killed. I thought other things were going to happen to me as well.”
When Bash asked AOC if she thought she was going to be raped, AOC answered, “Yeah, yeah. I thought I was.”
The left has been feeding its base a steady diet of racial fear and loathing for generations.
Ocasio-Cortez is Puerto Rican. Demings and Morris black. Also black is Michael Byrd, the Capitol Police lieutenant (now captain) who shot and killed January 6 protestor and Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt.
Babbitt and Boyland were both white.
The phrase “had the races been reversed” is such a manifest truism that pundits on the right no longer bother to complete the thought
If the shooting death of the attractive 35-year-old Babbitt was too public to ignore, the death of the obscure 34-year-old Boyland was not.
Biden’s incoming Department of Justice preferred to keep it that way. The nature of that death raised troubling questions not only about race but also about sex.
In the cause of equity, the DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) saw fit to put a small, slight woman at the front of a contested police line. In the DEI-drenched precincts of Washington, no one dared protest this madness either before January 6 or after.
In the days following Morris’s meltdown, all parties fell in line to preserve both the myth of heroic police resistance and the imagined role women played in that resistance. Consider this tweet from WUSA news anchor Lesli Foster on February 7, 2021:
“You MUST hear about Ofc. Lila Morris. MPD Acting Chief Contee says Morris ‘fought like hell’ in the tunnel of death…. Morris was injured, then got back in the melee. Women, too, fought hard to reclaim the #Capitol.”
Foster’s tweet included a photo of Morris being feted for her heroism at the Super Bowl, one of just three officers so honored.
A high percentage of the selected video footage that entertained Democrats for the last three years was shot in and around this “tunnel of death.” While protestors were freely walking into the Capitol through multiple other entrances, the police defended the tunnel as though it were the Alamo.
Caught in a scrum, Boyland found herself unwillingly pushed to the tunnel entrance. At this point, the MPD, now in riot gear, made a concerted surge to drive back the scrum. The chemical irritant sprayed by the MPD displaced the oxygen in the tunnel, causing people to feel faint. Rosanne collapsed, and as many as 30 people were shoved on top of her.
Once the others were pulled off, Rosanne lay momentarily lifeless and exposed at the tunnel entrance. That’s when Morris went after her. “I was horrified,” said 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.”
To protect Rosanne from both the crowd and the police, Texan protestor Luke Coffee stood over the dying woman, holding a crutch horizontally above his head. For his efforts to save Rosanne, he was charged with a felony for striking Morris. Not until Coffee’s January 2024 trial was Morris forced to testify about January 6.
Under oath, Morris conceded that Coffee never hit her. She also admitted that a baton or stick, was only to be used with a hand on either end as a way to push crowds back. “Are you ever trained to hold it like a bat and strike over somebody’s head?” asked Coffee’s attorney, Carol Stewart. “No,” said Morris.
To preserve the narrative of heroic police resistance, the DC medical examiner’s office sat on Boyland’s autopsy report for the maximum 90 days and then attributed her death to “acute amphetamine intoxication.” Amphetamine was the active ingredient in the Adderall that Boyland had been taking by prescription for ten years to deal with her ADHD.
The Boyland family was stunned. Boyland’s brother-in-law Justin Cave had reached out to childhood friend and MSNBC anchor Ayman Mohyeldin to help the family get to the bottom of Boyland’s death, but Mohyeldin was stonewalled by the medical examiner at every turn. “All our requests were denied,” admitted the surprised MSNBC anchor. “The trampling, the riot, the video evidence, none of this was even mentioned in the official autopsy report.”
Morris remained an unquestioned hero until September 2021, when that damning video surfaced of her striking Rosanne. Disturbed by what he saw, J6 video expert Gary McBride filed a police brutality complaint with the DC Metropolitan Police Department. McBride believes Rosanne was still alive when Morris struck her. “When she takes that second hit to the head, watch her left arm, her left arm straightens up and lifts off the ground,” he told the Epoch Times.
Morris need not have worried. Two months after McBride filed his complaint, he was informed via email, “The use of force within this investigation was determined to be objectively reasonable.” Morris would remain on the force and would face no criminal charges. The DOJ never investigated.
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 but none who witnessed Boyland’s death, not even Lila Morris. The eight-hundred-page final report, released in December 2022, goes into great detail about the two-hour battle at the “tunnel of death” but does not mention the name of the woman who died there, not even in the footnotes.
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Jack Cashill’s new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is now available in all formats.
