The husband of Ashli Babbitt, slain by a Capitol Police officer on Jan. 6, 2021, told Newsmax on Monday his 35-year-old wife, a former military police officer, "would have complied" with a police officer's order to move away from the area during a chaotic confrontation, but was never given "an opportunity to comply."
In an interview on National Report, Aaron Babbitt said U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrde "went from zero to 100" when he opened fire, fatally hitting Ashli. The officer has not faced charges in the death, and Aaron Babbitt has filed a multimillion-dollar claim over his wife's death.
"He says she didn't comply," Aaron Babbitt said. "You didn't give her an opportunity to comply. [Byrde] went from zero to 100 as far as the use-of-force continuum goes. He didn't give any verbal warnings. He didn't even make himself known."
Babbitt charged that another officer at the door where a crush of people were pushing into the building "was on Ashli's side" and later told investigators "'yah, I saw Byrde but there's no way that woman could have.'
"There's other officers in that area that are on record saying that they heard no verbal warnings. So my wife actually never knew he was even there."
According to Babbitt, his wife had 14 years of service with security forces in the Air Force — "a military police officer."
"She knows what it means. She knows that if there's a gun pointed at her and she's getting verbal warnings and we've progressed up that ladder of use-of-force, you know, she's gonna get shot — there's not a lot of people in this world that they want to get shot with a .40 caliber gun — so she would have complied if she was given the opportunity, but she was not."
Babbitt added there will be "a lot of depositions" in his legal claim, in which Judicial Watch is participating.
"There's a lot of people named in that complaint. … It wasn't just Byrde, the one that killed my wife," he said.
"There was other failures by government employees that day around Ashli, and around other people. So the government is responsible for the negligence of a lot of its employees, and that's what we're going to show."
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Fran Beyer ✉
Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.
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