If Seth Rich struggled with his attackers and was alive and talking to the emergency responders, what did he say? All I’ve been able to read is that he was “confused” because he gave as his address his previous address.
A pretty obvious question is whether he was asked if his attackers were black or white? If he was attacked by blacks, then the mugging theory sounds plausible. If he were attacked by two white men, however …
The Washington DC police aren’t terribly forthcoming about the case. Supposedly they found security video showing the legs of two attackers but nobody has ever seen it.
Still, it shouldn’t be that hard to find the emergency responders and ask them what the dying man said.
I read a long article by his hometown Omaha newspaper. I found an answer to the question of what was he doing out on the streets so late: the house he shared had poor cellphone reception, so he did a lot of his phone calls from his favorite sports bar or while walking the streets. He left the sports bar where he was a popular regular at about 1:30 am and then carried on two long phone calls with his girlfriend. She was visiting her home in Michigan. He’d been offered a job with the Hillary campaign, but that would require him to move to Brooklyn while his girlfriend had a job in DC. So they were having a lot of long conversations about their Relationship. They had a couple of calls of over 1.5 hours over the next couple of hours.
The neighborhood where he was killed was in the northeast, a little west of the Capitol and a mile or two north of there. It’s about a mile or more east of the Rock Creek Park that was the traditional dividing line between white and black Washington. It’s pretty close to where Matt Yglesias was the victim of the Knockout Game in 2011. I imagine the neighborhood is getting pretty gentrified, although when I was more familiar with Washington in 2000-2007 it was pretty dubious.
In general, Seth Rich doesn’t sound like a complicated man of mystery. He seems like a pretty regular guy. If he were the victim of an attempted mugging, I can imagine him fighting back, and a robber pulling a gun.
Or consider the Yglesias Precedent: maybe this was never a robbery, just Polar Bear Hunting. Maybe the DC government tried to make the case keep a low profile because the cops/EMTs recognized it as a racial attack. Coming right after the Dallas and Baton Rouge BLM massacres, this wouldn’t be good for Hillary.
Another interesting angle is that Hillary was the one who injected Seth Rich’s name into the national debate by bringing him up a couple of days later as an example of the need for gun control.
The Seth Rich case in 2016 could be like the Matthew Yglesias Knock-Out Game case in 2011: a sizable youngish Jewish guy walking down the street at night gets attacked by two blacks. No robbery.
I think Rich was a few blocks west of where Yglesias was attacked and there had been five more years of gentrification, so there have been conflicting reports about what kind of neighborhood it was.
The only characterization I’ve seen in the press of what Seth Rich told the emergency responders was that he seemed “confused” and that he didn’t realize he’d been shot, which suggests he didn’t see a gun drawn on him. He gave his previous address rather than his current one (he was about 100 yards from his group townhouse).
Another possibility is that “confused” is the characterization of the ambulance workers because they couldn’t process what Rich was telling them. For example, if he’d said two well-dressed white men walked past him and suddenly he was face down on the sidewalk, the typical DC EMT might chalk that up to trauma talking.
Washington DC has a Shot Spotter system that records gunfire and directs the police to the location. Apparently the cops showed up almost immediately. Presumably, this would suggest that the gunman didn’t use a silencer like in movie assassinations.
I see that a liberal group that looked into the case suggested a serial killer, which suggests that the case is more complicated than we are supposed to believe.
I see six possibilities:
– Mugging gone wrong
– Assassination
– Knock-Out Game gone wrong
– Serial killer
– Personal enemy
– Random encounter with armed man
If the cops have video footage of the lower half of the killers, simple questions would be: what kind of shoes are they wearing: ghetto sneakers or handmade Italian black leather shoes? What kind of pants are they wearing: basketball shorts or wool suit trousers? If they are dressed in, say, power company overalls, I’d be concerned about a hit.
But the odds are that Seth Rich was murdered by the Democratic Base rather than the Democratic Elite.
The media in DC should make a big deal out of the Seth Rich case to get the message out that the cops can respond awfully quickly now that they have this Shot Spotter technology.
COMMENTS:
* I’ve thought sometimes about the strange existence of Donald Trump.
What strikes me as peculiar is that I can’t think of anyone else who came within a thousand miles of being the sort of candidate he was, with the populist appeal and the ability to pull it all off. Try to think of the next best candidate — who would that even be?
He certainly is, for better and worse, an American Original. I predict no President over the last century — including, I think, FDR and Reagan — will have as much written about his Presidency as Trump.
I am starting to see large and unexpected upsides even to his in-your-face tweeting, and the crazed response of his critics. He is never in the background. No one can ignore a single thing he says. Even if his critics lambaste every policy proposal he makes, he gets his message out there so that it can’t be ignored. He vindicates the saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. In the somnolent Presidency of Obama, virtually nothing ever got said and heard about immigration. Now we never stop hearing about it, and thinking about it. The public starts to think about details of immigration policy that entirely passed their notice before, such as the Diversity lottery and chain immigration.
This is how change happens. It’s pretty amazing that it would be someone as seemingly “incurious” as Trump who would make so many people think and maybe change their minds.