And the mother of all conspiracy theories hits the rightblogosphere:

Fans of the late Andrew Breitbart are speculating as to why a forensic technician from the L.A. County Coroner's Office would suddenly drop dead on the day Breitbart's autopsy results were released.

They were two of the strangest L.A. deaths so far this year:

Breitbart, a hero of the free-thinking conservative, collapsed like a sack of bricks while walking home from a bar in Westwood at the beginning of March. Just minutes earlier, the 43-year-old media mogul been talking politics at a nearby bar with perfect strangers — who said he appeared happy, lively and otherwise well.

Coroner's employee Michael Cormier, 61, died almost two months later at his home in North Hollywood. LAPD detectives are looking into signs of possible “foul play” while waiting for the Coroner's Office to finish toxicology tests on Cormier's body. But police “sources” tell the Los Angeles Times that they believe he may have died from arsenic poisoning.

All this mysteriousness obviously led WordNetDaily, an “independent conservative news website with an emphasis on aggressive investigative reporting and gossip,” to beg the question:

“BREITBART'S CORONER POISONED TO DEATH?“

And InfoWars, “the home of the #1 Internet News Show in the World” (debatable), picks up the item, rehashing it into “Trail of Death: Breitbart Coroner Turns Up Dead, Arsenic Poisoning Suspected.”

Come — let us take a tour of the eager neuro pattern that led Team Breitbart to believe dear Cormier may have been killed by the same evil liberal who offed Breitbart.

  • Michael Cormier worked at the Coroner's Office.
  • Andrew Breitbart was examined by the Coroner's Office.
  • On the day of Cormier's death, the Coroner's Office released its final autopsy results for Breitbart. Officials declared the death “natural,” resulting from “heart failure.”
  • The day before Breitbart died, WorldNewsDaily claims he had interviewed Arizona's notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Then, on the day Breitbart died, Arpaio announced the Obama birth certificate may be a fake.
  • Breitbart was about to release the big career-toppling Obama Tapes, which — when released posthumously by his bloggin' minions — showed Obama getting chummy with radical race theorist Derrick Bell. Clear proof, they declared, that Obama hates white people.

Add a little imagination, and poof! You've got yourself an arsenic-wielding, heart-attack-inducing White House hitman, hired by the Democrat-Media-Complex to take out both Breitbart and the only coroner's employee willing to expose the truth.

Spoiler alert: The next couple paragraphs will be high on facts and low on fun.

L.A. County Coroner's Assistant Chief Ed Winter tells LA Weekly that Cormier did not conduct Breitbart's autopsy. “Only doctors” ever worked on Breitbart, says Winter, because foul play was not suspected from the beginning.

And LAPD Lieutenant Alan Hamilton says that Cormier's cause of death is very much still undetermined. Cormier apparently ran a small autopsy business out of his home, on top of the many chemicals he handled at the Coroner's Office. “Even if a substance was introduced,” says Hamilton, “It could be accidental, or a suicide, or a number of things.”

Unless maybe Winter and Hamilton are in on the conspiracy, too?

[@simone_electra / swilson@laweekly.com / @LAWeeklyNews]

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