Update 9: I just checked American Everyman, the blog run by Scott Creighton, which was excellent in deconstructing the Snowden business, and I notice that he is also certain that that Infiniti was NOT damaged in the photos.
He links to an earlier post of his that turns out to have analyzed exactly the same map in the NY Daily too.
I guess there were only so many sources to go to and we both reached the same conclusion. The “ramming” story is a bit of a crock, with the caveat that some video in the future might show it. So far, though, no cigar.
Sigh. I could have saved myself a lot of work over the weekend.
In any case, I suppose it’s good that the video footage be reviewed from as many different angles as possible.
I’m linking his analysis here.
Update 8: An anonymous poster at the CBS website claims that the chase began not from Penn. and 15th or E and 15th (in some accounts), but from East Executive and Alexander Hamilton Place, NW.
Looking it up, I find a guide to White House tours on a congressman’s website that lists the usual entry point for guests:
Tour instructions: Groups should enter the White House complex at the corner of 15th Street and Alexander Hamilton Place. Uniformed National Park Service Rangers are posted to assist groups as they arrive.
So it was normal for visitors to go to this area (all 3 locations are close to each other) if they wanted to visit the White House. There was no reason to find Carey suspicious just because she was there. On that day, of course, the area might have been cordoned off, because of the drill, or for some other reason. But surely an out of state visitor (and her tags would have shown she was out of state) couldn’t possibly be expected to know about that.
So the paranoia and aggression displayed by the police can’t be excused.
Unless, of course, the police were under the impression that DRILL was under way and Miriam Carey was part of it…
Update 7:
Whoa. Look at this:
“Ruwe was acting as the Incident Commander and worked with the Chemical Biological Incident Response Force, II Marine Expeditionary Force, during the opening day of Capital Shield 14, at the Lorton Va., emergency training site, Sept. 30.
Lorton was the site where Aaron Alexis, the Navy Yard shooter, bought his gun.]
More than 38 participating agencies from DOD and capital region response agencies performed mock mass casualty rescues, defense support to civil agency technical rescues and law enforcement tactical responses.”
So convenient. A young mother who never said anything about going to DC, suddenly shows up 270 miles away from where she’s supposed to be, on the final day of an emergency drill coordinated by 38 agencies from the DOD, and ends up being shot.
Here’s another thought.
Did Carey’s baby, Erica, the one who is so cool while being handled by strangers, after she just saw her mother shot to death by multiple bullets, after a high-speed chase involving at least five police cars, two injured officers, and three damaged vehicles, did Erica also just make those 270 miles with her mom the night before? If so, where did these two troopers stay?
Did they just camp out in the Infiniti? If so, that’s one heck of a tough kid….
Update 6: Looks like there was a drill going on at the time of Miriam Carey’s killing, Capital Shield 2014, according to the US Army website:
(hat-tip to Blacklisted News)
WASHINGTON (Oct. 1, 2013) — First responders in the National Capital Region need to keep their skills at a high level of proficiency. Participating in Capital Shield 14 is one of the methods they used to maintain their expertise.
Capital Shield 2014 is a joint training exercise in the National Capital Region, or NCR, that runs from Sept. 30 thru Oct. 3, and is hosted by the Joint Force Headquarters – National Capital Region. It brings federal, state, local and municipal agencies together to realistically test interagency operability during a crisis impacting the District of Columbia, Virginia and Maryland. It also trains and prepares the Department of Defense to provide defense support to civil authorities and employ appropriate force protection measures as requested.
“The importance of Capital Shield lies in the fact that emergencies are imminent,” said Cory R. Wright, JFHQ-NCR/MDW Capital Shield Exercise director. “They happen. When will they happen? We don’t know, but the importance of knowing who will respond and what their capabilities are can contribute to an emergency within the nation’s capital.”
Update 5: Michael Savage is rightly outraged. I understand cops might have been on high alert after the Navy Yard shooting two weeks ago (mid-September), but there’s nothing I can see here to make anyone figure Carey was a similar threat.
I’ve watched 3 different videos of this incident, several times each, and I routinely see people on the road driving in much more dangerous ways (heard of the game “chicken”?) than anything this poor woman did here.
Update 4:
Here is some video footage from the news outfit (Alhurra) referenced in the Time piece. The Time piece says that Carey’s Nissan Infiniti crashed into a police car.
Well, this particular Youtube video doesn’t show that, as far as I can see.
[Note: In the following passages I incorrectly describe the Alhurra footage as depicting the scene at the START of the chase. In reality, it’s from the middle of the chase, when the first shots were fired; it’s at Garfield Circle. I haven’t found any footage of the beginning of the chase at 15th St. and Penn Ave.]
In the opening shot, you can see the first incident that supposedly set off the police chase.
One poster at the CBS website has claimed that the real location is not 15th and E (or Pennsylvania Ave.:
“Note the diagonally placed buildings in the background, consistent with the scene being at East Executive and Alexander Hamilton Place, N.W.”
And it looks mighty strange to me.
There are 2-3 cops cars around Carey already as she drives up in a confused way to the barrier.
The cop cars look like they’re already boxing her in and she’s done nothing except wander into a place forbidden to the public. Anyone can make that mistake.
Second point. She’s not driving fast at all, as the New York Daily News describes it:
“The drama began around 2:20 p.m., officials said, after Carey — driving a black Infiniti — sped into the driveway leading to the White House and tried to breach security at 15th St. and Pennsylvania Ave. NW, officials said.
Doesn’t look like speeding nor an attempt to breach security. Could just have been a mistake. She lost her way and bumped – or nearly bumped – into the barrier.
One more car seems to join the group as the incident develops. Looks like at least 4, if not 5, cars at the scene, when she takes off.
Then there’s a noise like someone hit something. It coincides with the police car on Carey’s left (viewer right) hitting the barricade with its bumper.
[Lila: OK. That’s when one police officer got injured, when he bumped up against a barrier.]
The barricade looks like metal posts with nothing in between. I don’t see Carey or her car injuring anyone in this video either.
But the NY Daily News says this:
“Thwarted by the concrete barriers and confronted by cops with their guns drawn, Carey spun the car around and hit the gas — knocking a Secret Service agent over the hood of the car as she sped away.”
I didn’t see any of that in the Alhurra footage.
[Correction: I see now that the Alhurra footage is from the time she entered the Garfield Monument area and isn’t the start of the chase.
Then, Carey sets off with cops firing around her. There are 7 gun shots at this point, from the Alhurra video footage. I counted them and I heard one of the commentators on the videos (I forget which one) use that number too.
The New York Post reports that there were at least a dozen shots fired at her during the chase.
Not sure if they counted the ones at the Garfield Circle when they came up with the figure.
Finally, when the chase ends, in front of the Hart Senate building, there are multiple shots to her body.
The NY Daily News claims (below) that the first shooting took place at the Garfield Circle.
But if you watch the video, there were shots fired as soon as she took off from the barricade area, which I thought was at 15th Street and Pennsylvania Ave.
[Correction: The footage I saw was apparently from the Garfield Circle area and not from the start of the chase].
“At Garfield Circle, she raced through her first hail of bullets. At Constitution Ave. and Second St., she collided with a Capitol Police car and then barreled into some barricades outside the Hart Senate Office building.”
In this version, Carey is being reported as having hit a Capitol Police car AND the barricades. So she hit three things (two barricades and a police car) and there’s hardly visible damage on the bumper of her car. at the end of the chase. Mighty odd.
Update 3
The IJ (Independent Journal) Review has some graphics for the story (taken from the New York Daily News).
It looks like the Youtube video I posted below (Update 2) only shows parts of the chase.
HER SPEED
Carey might have been going slower in the video, but it’s possible she could have been doing 80 MPH when she was racing down Pennsylvania Ave to the Capitol.
A witness (NY Daily News) described the “screaming” of the car as it was chased by 3 police cars.
The video I posted before (update 2) looks to be from about the time she was driving around the Garfield Monument and was stopped. That was when the first round of shots were fired.
CRASHING THE BARRICADE
What’s interesting to me is that her Infiniti is supposed to have crashed into a barricade, setting off the chase, and then, been stopped by crashing into another barricade (in some accounts) or into a police car (in others) or into both (in another account).
But, the Infiniti, even at the end, looks quite intact. I thought I saw some slight damage around the left wheel, and of course, the pictures are not clear, but it’s not the kind of damage you’d get from ramming a barricade (or a car), while going at least 40 MPH….and possibly 80 MPH.
The hood of the car would have popped up with that impact and the child would have been squalling and agitated.
Instead, at least in the one photo two photos I saw, the child looks extremely composed.
There are many contradictions in the news reporting. Here’s one:
The New York Daily News, from where the map is taken in the IJ Review piece, claims that she crashed a second time into a police cruiser.
The Time reports that according to footage from Alhurra, she crashed into a secret service car guarding the Capitol.
That seems consistent with the damage on the side of the police car shown in the IJ Review piece.
But other articles say the second time she crashed, it was again, into a barricade.
But, whether into a barrier or into a police car, the visible state of the Infiniti doesn’t seem to support the claim of a crash.
And while some pieces describes a “police cruiser” as having been damaged by crashing into a barrier, the photo in the IJ Review shows a police car with extensive damage to the side.
It looks T-boned to me. How do you crash into a barrier from the side, like that? That’s not side-swipe damage. [Probably that’s the car she crashed into and the cruiser that crashed into the barrier is the one being shown in the Alhurra footage at Garfield Circle, where it bumps into a metal barrier.]
Finally, there’s another picture at the IJ Review of Erica, Carey’s 1-2 year old baby, being carried by a cop. She looks quite placid even there. She also looks much older than 1-2. Reports about the age of the baby and when Carey got pregnant are also contradictory, although that’s too be expected in early reporting.
The New York Post says she was 2-3 (which is also what the family reported first):
“A child believed to be a girl about 2 or 3 years old was found unhurt in her black Infiniti sedan, which had Connecticut license plates.”
The child in the pictures I saw was not 1. It was more like 2 or 3.
The contradictions about the crash events themselves are less forgivable.
INJURED POLICEMEN
The New York Daily News also claims Carey injured two policemen.
Thwarted by the concrete barriers and confronted by cops with their guns drawn, Carey spun the car around and hit the gas — knocking a Secret Service agent over the hood of the car as she sped away.
The same piece describes the two injured officers as a Secret Service agent (perhaps the one above) and Capitol Hill police officer (probably the one whose car got damaged).
Update 2 (October 6):
I watched the video of Miriam Carey on youtube.
From what I saw, it looks like
1. Her Nissan Infinity (the luxury end of Nissan’s offerings) was not damaged. The front bumper and license plate were intact. Even if she did bump into the barricade, she could not have done much damage, it seems to me. Much more likely, she got close, and then fled when she was surrounded.
2. When she drives off and circles the area, she doesn’t seem to me to be driving carelessly. Her turns are not careening and wild, as they usually are in high-speed chases.
3. Everyone said she was doing 80 mph. But from what I saw, she wasn’t going that fast. Too fast for the neighborhood, but not that crazily fast. More like 40 mph 50 MPH.
4. I didn’t see her ramming anyone else [the part where she evades the 5 officers in the beginning is obscured though), bearing down on any by-standers, returning gunfire, or in anyway threatening anyone else. I fail to see why she was treated as if she were committing vehicular homicide.
5. Why the macho response, with what looked like 5 policemen circling her with guns? Looks like she just drove into the wrong place. Do the cops shoot you for that?
6. The cops materialized very fast. It definitely looked a bit staged to me. Of course, the family is said to have identified the body. But I truly wonder.
Possibilities: This was a bad bit of over-reaction from the cops, who are now in full CYA (cover your ass) mode…OR
It is some kind of staged event, some kind of learning moment that intelligence agencies have devised, perhaps to make maternity a psychiatric event, with a full panoply of therapy and drugs that will be introduced into some future health care program…..or, as I blogged before, to draw attention to electro-magnetic harassment.
OR
The woman was a known threat…someone who had to be eliminated for some reason…and was then framed as a psychotic. Perhaps that “stair-case fall” was not an accident, but a previous attempt on her life. That would be supported by her own fears of being stalked, her complaint that her car tires were slashed. Some neighbor is supposed to have said she always drove too fast. Again, this sounds very exculpatory for the cops. Could this convenient quote have been coerced or bribed out of someone? Or, had Carey panicked and raced away before, thinking she was being followed? Or, are the negative remarks evidence of some kind of concerted “group” harassment of her?
Hard to tell without much more information.
Update:
As I review what I’ve read, the only theory that covers all the facts so far is that Miriam Carey actually interacted with Obama and may have posed a threat to him – or to someone close to him.
That would account for her going to the White House. It would account for her so-called “fixation” with him and her fear he was stalking her. It would account for her sudden run of bad luck; it would account for the gang-stalking; it would account for the way her apartment was searched (with robots, in case there was a bomb there); it would account for her crying jags and depression.
It would explain why she had to be killed.
And, of course, there is not a shred of hard proof that she ever met him.
It is pure speculation on my part…..
ORIGINAL POST
Miriam Carey, the 34 year old dental hygienist who was killed by DC cops after she allegedly crashed her car into a barrier at the White House and then supposedly led a high-speed chase that injured police, is said to have been suffering from post-partum depression.
CORRECTION After reading the reports in detail and looking at video footage, I have to say the media is making a lot of incorrect claims. It’s not clear how “high-speed” the chase was. So far, I’ve seen the Infiniti doing about 50 MPH.
Carey doesn’t seem to have injured the policeman. He injured himself hitting a barrier (if that is the case). From the lack of damage to the front part of the Infiniti, even after the second crash, it doesn’t look as if she hit any barricades.
Anti-depressants were allegedly found by law enforcement at her Stamford Connecticut apartment, and her family has testified to her depression.
Stamford is a bedroom community for New York. Carey, born and raised in Brooklyn, where she lived from 1997 on, had moved to Stamford because rents were too high in New York.
She was fired from her job at Advanced Periodontics in August 2012, for “being too rough.”
Her former employer said she had a staircase fall in January 2012, and suffered head and neck injuries. That’s around the time she is said to have begun exhibiting symptoms of what reports are now alleging is post-partum depression.
Others report the fall as having taken place in April, 2012. She is said to have found out she was pregnant at the time.
Other issues: Carey is said to have been sued by her condo association for not having paid her dues.
“According to a report from the Associated Press, Carey stopped paying association dues on her Stamford, Connecticut, condo in August 2010 and was sued by the condo association in November last year for $1,759 in unpaid fees plus collection costs. The lawsuit was settled in February.”
She is reported to have been fired from her job because the handicap parking permit she got as a result of her injuries led to a fight with her employers.
“Carey worked as a dental hygienist in Hamden, Conn. until August 2012, according to NBC Connecticut. Her former boss, Dr. Barry Weiss, described her as “hot-tempered” but said “nothing in her behavior would have led us to think this would have happened.” Carey’s license to practice as a dental hygienist expired Thursday.
Dr. Brian Evans, who also oversaw Carey while she worked at the Hamden clinic, revealed she was hospitalized a few years ago. She “fell down some stairs and she had a pretty significant head injury,” Evans told the New York Daily News. As she recovered in the hospital, she discovered she was pregnant and “seemed happy,” he said.
Carey was ultimately fired from the practice in 2012, Dr. Weiss said, after “complaints about her from patients.”
Reports also allege that she claimed to the police that she was a prophet and that she knew that Barack Obama was stalking her electronically and would lock down Stamford because of her.
Coincidence One:
She has a sister, Valery Carey, who is an entrepreneur in the area of female hormones. Valery Carey’s outfit is called Time Of The Month (TOTM) – a reference to menstruation cycles. Post-partum depression is part of TOTM’s agenda.
Valery Carey is a “community activist,” (shades of community organizer par excellence, Barack Obama) formerly with the NY police department. She notes the following on her Facebook page (italics are mine):
My partners along with the cofounders of 5Linx have donated over $57,000 to the Trayvon Martin Foundation. THIS is why I’m in Florida. — with Schmoll Reaves-Bey at Orange County Convention Center.
I have blogged about the Trayvon Martin case as an example of the kind of media-driven, racially polarizing public debate that is likely to have been contrived/fanned by the same elements that planned an Obama re-election campaign centered around race-baiting.
Valery Carey writes at her website:
“TOTM! Time Of The Month!® is not just a calendar planner to track your menstrual cycle. It’s a movement of female empowerment!”
Coincidence two:
The media is reporting that Carey thought she was being stalked by President Obama.
Her sister had apparently been involved with a group that once hosted President Obama. There is a real chance that Miriam Carey met Obama in person.
If so, could there have been some kind of relationship?
That would account for many things in this strange story….
Coincidence three:
Carey lived in Stamford, Connecticut.
Newtown, Connecticut is the site of the Sandy Hook school shooting (Dec. 14, 2012), the second deadliest in US history.
Stamford is only 51 minutes from Newton, if I go by Google.
In January 2013, the SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center, a notable hate-monitoring (and some would say, hate-purveying) site mentioned a Stamford property as the target of a police investigation.
Bombs and racist propaganda had apparently been found.
The Anti-Defamation League devotes special attention to Stamford, as a hotbed of white racism (not just the KKK, but conservative groups), as well as of sovereign citizen and paramilitary groups.
Stamford even has a book written about it – “Rogue Town,” which describes its time as the headquarters of the Genovese and Gambino crime families during the 1970s and 1980s.
Supposedly, it was cleaned up in the 90s.
But how can we be sure? The Gambino and Genovese crime families are intimately connected to Wall Street and the stock market.
President Barack Obama, was, of course, the choice of the hedge-fund community.
Coincidence Four:
Like Aaron Alexis, the Navy Yard shooter of only two weeks ago (Sept 16, 2013), Carey claimed to have suffered electro-magnetic harassment.
Question one: Can we find out if Carey did meet Obama, at some point? Why did she think he was stalking her? Or is this “fact” just being put out by the media uncritically? Is there any other source for it besides the police and her boyfriend?
Carey’s business was also adversely affected by Obama’s health care policy initiatives.
Question two: Could her professional problems have made her more politically active than her friends think she was? Could her activism have led to her becoming a target?
Question three: How do we know that drugs were not planted in her apartment?
Question four: How do we know she wasn’t being gang-stalked? See this website about gangstalking.
The pseudonymous author of the website, Peacefrog, suggests, plausibly, that Carey was being gang-stalked by the Stamford police and that the media reports about her dispute with her neighbors, unflattering comments by neighbors, and her complaint that her tires were slashed in 2012, are all evidence of gang-stalking.
Several websites – I can’t say how reliable – specifically mention the Stamford police and gang-stalking. Frankly, her resume doesn’t sound like that of a delusional woman.
Even if she did suffer from some post-partum depression, it doesn’t follow that that was the cause of her belief that she was being stalked. Perhaps, instead, it was the stalking that caused her to fall into a depression in the first place.
5. Is this, like the Snowden “revelations,” some kind of government damage-control exposure, intended to let the public know that yes, electronic harassment and gang-stalking DO go on, while limiting the range of discussion and implicitly threatening/intimidating the public?
[Notice the violent, over-the-top law enforcement response; the innuendos about terrorism; the imputation of mental disorder to the dead woman.]
I am quoting the headline to your [Lila: Brennan’s] post!
As for your entire post, I still haven’t been able to understand what your thought process is in the post, given that it is so poorly written, as commeters [sic] above have noted. Further your asshole remark about “cartoon libertarians” and then linking to EPJ suggests you don’t deserve to be read carefully.