The Ballad of Edgar Maddison Welch

His intel wasn't 100 percent

Edgar Maddison Welch died the way he lived, full of bullets and black pills.

Welch, you may recall, was a pioneering exponent of the brain-capture that came to be known as QAnon.

Younger folks could understand Welch as sort of the Luigi of 2016. Like Luigi, he flamboyantly fired a gun to make an ideological point, just after an election that put Donald Trump in the White House. His crime was AR-15ing a thin-crust pizza place thinking he was liberating enslaved children, but there were no enslaved children.

Just this week, tragedy came to Welch again. On Monday, he was riding with some pals in Kannapolis, N.C., when a cop allegedly recognized him as an outlaw whose rap sheet since 2016 includes a bunch of new stuff. The cop was right, or so the Kannapolis chief of police told the media. So he went to arrest Welch.

Welch for his part reached for his go-to remedy—a gun. A slim, strawberry-blond Cobain type, when not scowling in militia gear, he didn’t look like a mad dog. But he aimed his gun squarely at the police officer.

Police officers dislike this. This one told Welch to put it down and then, after a decorous interval, shot him. Welch, at 36, died from his injuries.

What a life. There’s much to fill in from the consequential years from 2016 to 2025. How much time did Welch serve of his four year sentence? What did he think of QAnon, the omnibus conspiracy bill that sucked up pizzagate and took it galactic?