Incredibly, a website, conspicuously calling itself “the Fourth Estate” is claiming to have found evidence that Freddie Gray’s death by severed spine was somehow caused by his recent spinal surgery and not his arrest and abuse at the hands of police.

The Fourth Estate has contacted sources who allege that Freddie Gray received spinal and neck surgery a week before we was arrested, and was allegedly receiving a large structured settlement from Allstate Insurance.  The surgery is allegedly related to a car accident in which Gray was involved.

The trouble with this nonsense is that it does not explain how Freddie managed to run from police with this theoretically life-threatening spinal injury, immediately before his limp body was dragged to the wagon that drove him to his death.

Nor does it explain why another man, arrested a decade ago in Baltimore for peeing in public, suffered the same tragic death from spine injuries, at the hands of police.

There are questions about what happened to Freddie Gray in the back of the police van in which he was placed after being arrested by Baltimore Police officers, just as there were 10 years ago with Johnson, Sr.

Johnson was arrested in 2005 for public urination on Pimlico Road, documents show.  They say he was cuffed and then put into the back of a police wagon. During that ride he was critically injured and sent to Sinai Hospital where doctors confirmed that his spine was dislocated.

It’s understandable and not surprising that police and their sympathizers would want to grab at straws to distance these officers from the terrible fate Freddie Gray suffered at their hands, but this is truly feeble and pathetic.

Even if it’s true that Freddie Gray had a car accident that gave him some whiplash, that does nothing to absolve the police of responsibility for his death from a severed spine, or explain why another man died ten years ago, from the same injuries, at the hands of the same police force.

But according to them, ‘Freddie should have stayed home, instead of going out to sell drugs.’ Never mind that there was never any evidence that he was engaged in such activities.

“Freddy Gray decided to go out and ended up getting in a scuffle with the police instead of healing properly.  The police didn’t mistreat him at all; he mistreated himself.”

And by the same twisted and sadistic logic, over the last fifty years, the people of Baltimore are guilty of economically oppressing and neglecting themselves.