The Sycamore killers, the J6 rioters...
And the age of disinhibition
Why did they do it?
Graham and Carruthers
We’ll start with the tree-killers. Last week two men in their 30s, Daniel Graham of Carlisle and Adam Carruthers of Wigton, were found guilty by a jury of cutting down the famous sycamore that stood symmetrically in a gap between two hillocks on Hadrian’s Wall. At Newcastle Crown Court Mrs Justice Lambert warmed them to be prepared for "lengthy" prison terms when she sentences them in July. In the meantime, they’re being held in custody just in case some vengeful dendrophile decides to exact a more radical punishment on these two spectacularly unpopular men.
The pair were bang to rights and their defences were ludicrous. The tree was cut down on the night of the 27th September 2023, but it wasn’t until August the next year that Graham called the Northumbria police as an anonymous informant and told them that Carruthers was the culprit. His voice was immediately recognised by the officer taking the call and he and Carruthers were arrested. In court Graham said Carruthers had done it alone, Carruthers said he hadn’t done it at all and had no idea who did. The evidence showed beyond any conceivable doubt that both men had travelled in Graham’s Range Rover to the scene that night, and that they had taken a wedge of the destroyed tree as a souvenir.
The prosecutor had portrayed the felling as an act of “moronic vandalism” – ie it was criminal damage committed out of pure stupidity “for a laugh”. But two factors weigh against such a flat explanation. The first is that Carruthers while giving evidence had said that when the news of the sycamore’s destruction broke he had been surprised by the horrified public reaction because it was “just a tree”. But if it was “just a tree” why had he chosen to travel miles at night and cut it down in the dark? Obviously he felled it precisely because it was a famous tree that many people visited and loved.
Second, even if we accept that anything is ever truly “mindless”, two men in early middle age – one of whom had become a father for the second time 12 days before he chopped down the tree – very deliberately planning their crime can’t really be equated with a pair of 14-year-olds spontaneously smashing up a bus-stop. Graham and Carruthers went to a lot of effort to destroy that tree. It was mindful vandalism.
But why? Bear with me.
Ashli Babbitt
At the beginning of this month, it was reported that the Trump administration was settling a civil suit brought by the family of Ashli Babbitt, a woman rioter who was shot dead during the January 6th, 2021, attack on the Capitol. In a case previously contested by the Biden administration, the settlement means that the family will probably receive several million dollars in compensation.
On the day she died the 35-year-old Babbitt had been part of the crowd that had stormed the building, forced their way past police officers, assaulting many of them, trying to prevent the certification of the election of Joe Biden. In anyone’s language (or anyone who isn’t mad or bad) this was a violent attempt to subvert the democratic process, and Babbitt was part of it.
Inside the building she managed to get as far as a closed but windowed door on the other side of which were Capitol staff who were being evacuated, guarded by several police officers. The crowd smashed the windows, and it was when Babbitt was among the first to try and get through one of the gaps that she was shot and killed with a bullet to the neck. She had received numerous warnings to stay back. She fell backwards and on to the floor. A reporter from the Atlantic magazine reviewing the footage from several mobile phones describes how:
There’s a sudden stillness, followed by a just-as-sudden light show of cellphones. Someone standing above her body introduces himself as being from Infowars, the far-right conspiracy-mongering site owned by Alex Jones, and offers to buy footage from someone else who was filming closer to Ashli.
Within months Babbitt was being praised by Donald Trump as a martyred patriot, and he recorded a posthumous birthday greeting for her in October 2021. The officer who shot and killed her was exonerated of any wrongdoing by two investigations, but (as you can imagine) has suffered harassment from MAGA partisans.
Babbitt’s journey part one
Ashli Babbitt was a Californian who had left school and gone into the Airforce, where she served in various capacities over 12 years. When she demobbed, she took a job first as a security guard at a nuclear power plant near Chesapeake Bay, which is where she met her second husband. They subsequently moved back to California and set up a pool servicing company.
After her death her mother-in-law told journalists that her son hadn’t joined his wife on January 6th, adding "I really don't know why she decided to do this.”