(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch announced today that it received 1160 pages of documents from Washington, DC’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) related to Air Force veteran and San Diego native Ashli Babbitt. These new documents reveal that OCME submitted a request for permission to cremate Babbitt only two days after taking custody of her body and that ’due to the "high profile nature" of Babbitt’s case, Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Francisco Diaz requested that a secure electronic file with limited access be created for Babbitt’s records. Additionally, Babbitt’s fingerprints were emailed to a person supposedly working for the DC government, which resulted in Microsoft "undeliverable" messages written in Chinese characters being returned.
Babbitt was shot and killed by an unidentified law enforcement officer as she attempted to climb through a broken interior window in the Capitol Building, located outside the Speaker’s Lobby off the House Floor during the January 6 disturbance. She was unarmed. At the time of the shooting, several officers reportedly can be seen in videos, standing in the crowd of protestors in which Babbitt was present.
The records were obtained in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit concerning two FOIA requests submitted by Judicial Watch on April 8, 2021 to the Metropolitan Police Department and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for records related to Babbitt’s death (Judicial Watch v. The District of Columbia (No. 2021 CA 001710 B)).
The newly obtained records reveal:
No flowers, no remembrances or celebration of live, no veteran's burial at Arlington.