Uh oh: Witness says Freddie Gray intentionally injured himself in police van

Perhaps overlooked in the midst of the Baltimore riots is the fact that their purported cause - the death of Freddie Gray in police custody - remains a mystery insofar as the investigation of its cause is not complete. The presumption of the mobs and of the media is that the cops beat Gray and caused the spinal injury that led to his death.

But what is the basis for that presumption, apart from the now-dominant media white-cops-beat-black-men narrative? Nothing in the form of actual facts. We know the media narrative in Ferguson proved to be wildly inaccurate, especially the hands-up-don't-shoot lie that gained so much undeserved currency. It couldn't happen again, could it? Well, a document obtained by the Washington Post suggests that it just might:

A prisoner sharing a police transport van with Freddie Gray told investigators that he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed that he “was intentionally trying to injure himself,” according to a police document obtained by The Washington Post. The prisoner, who is currently in jail, was separated from Gray by a metal partition and could not see him. His statement is contained in an application for a search warrant, which is sealed by the court. The Post was given the document under the condition that the prisoner not be named because the person who provided it feared for the inmate’s safety. The document, written by a Baltimore police investigator, offers the first glimpse of what might have happened inside the van. It is not clear whether any additional evidence backs up the prisoner’s version, which is just one piece of a much larger probe. Gray was found unconscious in the wagon when it arrived at a police station on April 12. The 25-year-old had suffered a spinal injury and died a week later, touching off waves of protests across Baltimore, capped by a riot Monday in which hundreds of angry residents torched buildings, looted stores and pelted police officers with rocks.

There is clearly a danger in jumping to conclusions on the basis of one document outside the context of the larger investigation, especially when the source is also a crime suspect. We are far from knowing the full story. The autopsy report will tell us a lot about whether this story has some credibility, or whether there was indeed some brutality visited upon Gray by the cops. But the point here is that not knowing the facts didn't stop the media from jumping all over the story as if it was clearly a case of police brutality, thus giving the mobs the excuse they needed to riot and loot the city. If indeed it turns out that Gray did this to himself, who is held responsible for stirring up the rioters? Oh. Right. No one. There is never any such accountability. The media will run with their narrative regardless of the facts, and when riots result, that becomes yet another story that they relish. Is it possible that a person could give himself a fatal spinal injury? Sure. It's unlikely, but freak spinal injuries are hardly unheard of in the history of sports. A guy banging his head against a wall could hit the wall at an awkward angle and do a lot more damage to himself than he was intending. Obviously we still don't know, but if this turns out to be the case, then I'd say it's time to turn the spotlight of suspicion away from the police and start shining it on the media, which jumps on these stories with reckless abandon before really having the facts. In this case, people got hurt and property got destroyed because the media gleefully incited a mob - quite possibly for no reason whatsoever. There should be some price to pay for doing that.

Dan Calabrese——Bio and Archives

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