Late Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick’s mother said she still doesn’t know what killed her son but doesn’t think it was because he was hit in the head with a fire extinguisher.
While investigators haven’t released a cause of death for Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer whose death after the Jan. 6 riot sparked outrage, his mother, 74-year-old Gladys Sicknick, said she has largely been kept in the dark.
Brian Sicknick, 42, was first confirmed to have died on Jan. 7. He “was injured while physically engaging with protesters” and “returned to his division office and collapsed” and died from his injuries after being transported to an area hospital, the Capitol Police said in a statement.
Rioters hit him in the head with a fire extinguisher, the New York Times reported on Jan. 8, although that theory has yet to be borne out as authorities have been largely mum about the death. Gladys Sicknick suggested that instead of a fire extinguisher, her son might have succumbed to a stroke.
“He wasn’t hit on the head, no. We think he had a stroke. But we don’t know anything for sure,” Sicknick told the Daily Mail. “We’d love to know what happened.”
On the same day it was reported that Brian Sicknick might have been hit in the head with a fire extinguisher, his brother, Ken Sicknick, told ProPublica that his brother had not been rushed to the hospital amid the rioting but texted him after he returned to his police department.
“He texted me last night and said, ‘I got pepper-sprayed twice,’ and he was in good shape,” Ken Sicknick said.
Douglas Buchanan, chief of communications for Washington, D.C.’s Department of Fire and Emergency Medical Services, said Brian Sicknick was not rushed from the scene of the Capitol siege to the hospital and had returned to his department before his hospitalization.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Capitol Police for comment.
President Biden and first lady Jill Biden, along with his fellow police officers, attended Sicknick’s memorial service in the Capitol rotunda. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
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The Senate began a series of joint hearings on Tuesday, aiming to examine the security failures that led to rioters overrunning the Capitol complex.
