Fox News host Jesse Watters says he didn’t see any “death blows” in the damning body-cam footage of the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five Memphis cops.
The footage shows the cops pull Nichols over for a traffic stop before aggressively tossing him on the pavement as they shout threats and draw their guns.
“Bitch, put your hands behind your back,” one cop said. “I’ll knock your ass the fuck out,” he followed up, before tasering Nichols.
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More footage shows cops repeatedly punching him in the head before pepper spraying him as he desperately called out for his mother.
Watters, however, suggested perhaps the police were not to blame for his death at all.
“We don’t know if this guy was on something,” Watters said. “And we don’t have an autopsy from the city, an official autopsy. Immediately, you know, I didn’t see any death blows. Maybe it was an accumulation of blunt force trauma to the head.”
“Did you see anything that told you that was it?” Watters asked his guest, retired NYPD officer Bill Stanton.
Stanton replied that he had not seen any officers “stomping” on Nichols’ head or “kicking him in the face” in the footage. But the footage did clearly show two officers hold Nichols down while a third walked up and kicked him in the head.
In Fox News synergy, “The Five” anchor Brian Kilmeade had also offered up a defense of the cops just hours before the footage dropped.
“Does it bother you that you don't have the cops’ perspective at all?” he said. “It looks overwhelming, I get it. But don't we need both sides?”
Kilmeade—who previously said people “shouldn’t blindly back the blue” after the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate—is now singing a different tune, despite Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis denouncing their actions as “heinous, reckless and inhumane.”
“When the video is released in the coming days, you will see for yourselves,” Davis said Wednesday of the now-fired cops’ vicious assault of Nichols.
All five cops have been charged with second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct and official oppression—and each will have “their day in court,” as Kilmeade’s co-anchor Gillian Hunter reminded him.
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