Which Jan. 6 officers later died by suicide or from conditions linked to the riot, and how have those deaths been classified legally?
Executive summary
Four law-enforcement officers who responded to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol later died by suicide—Howard “Howie” Liebengood, Jeffrey Smith, Gunther Hashida and Kyle DeFreytag—and those deaths have been the subject of official rulings, benefit-law changes and debate about whether they should be classified as line-of-duty deaths; one additional officer collapsed at the Capitol and died of a stroke a day later, a death many observers link to the assault but whose precise legal classification is treated differently in reporting [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. Who died by suicide after responding to Jan. 6, and when did those suicides occur?
Multiple contemporary reports and department statements identify four officers who took their own lives after deployment to the Capitol: U.S. Capitol Police Officer Howard Liebengood died by suicide days after the attack, Metropolitan Police Officer Jeffrey Smith died by suicide nine days after Jan. 6, and two other Metropolitan Police officers—Gunther Hashida and Kyle DeFreytag—died by suicide several months later in July 2021; outlets including CNN, WUSA9 and FactCheck have cataloged that timeline and confirmed the connections to their Jan. 6 service [5] [2] [6].
2. Which death have been formally classified as “in the line of duty,” and by whom?
Jeffrey Smith’s suicide was explicitly ruled by Washington’s Police and Firefighters’ Retirement and Relief Board to have Jan. 6 as the “sole and direct cause,” and his widow’s legal push helped secure that determination (Reuters) [3]. The Department of Justice and other federal authorities have also treated at least one officer’s suicide as a line-of-duty death under new federal policy expansions, a change enabled by Congress’s renewal of the Public Safety Officer Support Act that extended benefits to suicides tied to traumatic duty experiences (NPR; DOJ reporting; San) [4] [7] [8]. Reporting ties these administrative decisions to newly available statutory mechanisms that make families eligible for first-responder death benefits when causation from duty can be shown [7] [8].
3. The medical and evidentiary bases cited for linking suicide to Jan. 6
Advocates and some medical experts submitted forensic evidence, autopsy details and behavioral declarations that described head trauma, loss of consciousness after being struck and subsequent mood and behavioral changes as part of the causal chain leading to suicide—facts relied upon by the retirement board in Smith’s case and referenced in reporting about legal claims brought by widows and families (FactCheck; The Independent; Reuters) [6] [9] [3]. These expert opinions were used in administrative and legal processes to establish an occupational trigger for suicide, a standard that remains contentious in some quarters but accepted in specific rulings cited in the reporting [6] [3].
4. Disputed classifications, policy gaps and broader implications
Congressional debate and advocacy have centered on the fact that, historically, suicide was often excluded from automatic line-of-duty recognition and survivor benefits, a gap that the Public Safety Officer Support Act’s renewal sought to close after the Jan. 6 aftermath [10] [7]. Some lawmakers and families argued that refusing to memorialize or compensate officers who died by suicide amounted to a failure to reckon with duty-related trauma [10], while agencies have been careful to tie benefits and line-of-duty designations to specific findings of causation, meaning not every post-Jan. 6 death was automatically classified as such without evidentiary review [7] [3].
5. Deaths from physical conditions allegedly linked to the riot and the limits of public reporting
On Jan. 6 itself a Capitol Police officer collapsed and later died of a stroke; numerous reports note family beliefs and investigative threads that link his collapse to being assaulted during the riot, but public sources provided here do not uniformly record a final legal classification for that death—reporting documents the event and family statements but does not present a single, definitive administrative ruling in the sources reviewed [1] [4]. That evidentiary and legal gap highlights the limitation of the public record cited: some deaths have been formally adjudicated as line-of-duty while others remain characterized in reporting as linked by family, colleagues, or preliminary medical findings rather than universally settled legal determinations [1] [4] [3].