Boebert, a Republican, told the story to Fox News in a 2014 piece on the restaurant’s gun packaging servers. She said this during her successful 2020 campaign for Congress. She said this at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2021.
And on Wednesday, she said it again on the floor of the House of Representatives during a debate on a bill that would require background checks for arms sales by unlicensed or private sellers.
“There was a quarrel outside my restaurant where a man was physically killed. There were no weapons involved. He was killed by another man’s hands. I have a lot of young girls working in my restaurant. And we need had an equalizer, ‘Boebert said in the House.
Given the initial existence of a murder investigation and given the testimony of some witnesses about a physical altercation – which we cannot independently confirm – it is at least possible that Boebert had a real confusion as to why the man died and that the incident contributed to her decision to carry a gun.
Yet the death was declared accidental in September 2013, so Boebert therefore had more than seven years to get her facts right. She went on to say the man was beaten to death, even after the Colorado Sun remarked in a lengthy article in 2020 about her that the incident was considered a drug death.
Police did not file a complaint in the incident, Tommy Klein, chief of police for the gun, told CNN on Thursday. Klein said the murder case was considered unfounded based on the medical findings.
In a post-mortem report, the forensic pathologist, dr. Robert A. Kurtzman, told CNN CNN that there is a high level of methamphetamine in the man’s system and that the man has pulmonary edema, a fluid builds up in the lungs. sometimes associated with the use of methamphetamine. “Methamphetamine is known to cause sudden death and abnormal behavior,” Kurtzman wrote.
Kurtzman wrote that the man had ‘superficial abrasions corresponding to a fall’ but no related internal injury, plus ‘a non-specific patterned abrasion around the left upper arm and chest’ without any concomitant internal injury. He wrote that the man may have had a physical altercation in the area, ‘ran from the scene and collapsed’.
We asked Klein if he was sure that the death described in the investigation documents his department provided to CNN was the only death Boebert could talk about. Klein said he was “sure.”
Boebert’s office on Thursday did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment. On Friday, Boebert
objected on Twitter to a Washington Post fact check that awarded her three “Pinocchios” about the story. She argued that the Pinocchios were undeserved because the Post, according to her, “agrees with me that a man fought and died less than a block from my restaurant.” However, that is not what she actually claimed on the House floor on Wednesday; again she said the man was ‘beaten to death’.
It is noteworthy that Boebert was sometimes a little more cautious in her language about the incident than Wednesday.
In one interview in 2014 with a Colorado newspaper, spotted by the fact-checking website Snopes, Boebert said a man was assaulted in a ‘quarrel’ outside the restaurant and that he eventually died. ‘
In a Twitter video that Boebert posted in January 2021, she
said, “After a violent incident outside my business, I took advantage of Colorado’s public laws and started doing work.”
Again, we cannot confirm or deny the allegation that there was an assault or a violent incident. But in these versions of the story, Boebert at least does not say that the man was beaten to death.
CNN’s TPara Subramaniam contributed to this report.
