The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department said Sunday that authorities investigating the death of Auxiliary Bishop David O’Connell are handling the situation as a murder investigation, a spokesperson told The Daily Wire.

O’Connell, 69, of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, was shot dead in his home in the suburb of Hacienda Heights.

ABC News correspondent Alex Stone first reported that authorities ruled out a suicide overnight. A medical emergency was reported in his home on Saturday afternoon.

Los Angeles County Sheriff's investigators now believe the death of auxiliary bishop of LA Archdiocese David O'Connell to be murder. Suicide was ruled out overnight after O'Connell was found dead after a medical emergency call on Saturday afternoon in a home.

— Alex Stone (@astoneabcnews) February 19, 2023

Authorities did not comment to The Daily Wire on that report. Investigators previously marked the bishop’s death as suspicious, but few details were available.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department told CBS Los Angeles that the shooting happened just before 1 p.m. Saturday. Deputies arrived and found a man with a gunshot wound to the chest. The victim was pronounced dead soon after.

“I am very sad this afternoon to report that our beloved Auxiliary Bishop David O’Connell has passed away unexpectedly,” Archbishop of Los Angeles José H. Gomez said in a statement Saturday. “It is a shock and I have no words to express my sadness.”

“As a priest and later a bishop here in Los Angeles for forty-five years, Bishop Dave was a man of deep prayer who had a great love for Our Blessed Mother,” Gomez added. “He was a peacemaker with a heart for the poor and the immigrant, and he had a passion for building a community where the sanctity and dignity of every human life was honored and protected.”

O’Connell was named Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles by Pope Francis in 2015. He served as chairman of the interdiocesan Southern California Immigration Task Force, which helped respond to an influx of immigration from Central America in recent years. He was also chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Subcommittee on the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.

John Rigolizzo contributed to this report.

Twitter sleuth and independent journalist Matt Taibbi blasted Big Media for ignoring the social media platform’s collaboration with government officials to silence Americans, but noted it finally made headlines when a clash between former President Trump and a left-wing celebrity surfaced.

Taibbi, the former Rolling Stone writer and one of a handful of journalists new Twitter owner Elon Musk has enlisted to air the platform’s secret censorship, said his findings “produced exactly zilch in mainstream news coverage in the last two months.” But hearings before the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee earlier this month revealed that Trump had sought to have a tweet posted by Chrissy Teigen removed, which finally generated coverage.

“Purely to show the bankruptcy of media in this area, let’s introduce a pair of loud new data points, and see if any press figures at all cover either of them,” Taibbi wrote in his latest Twitter Files thread. “If a president freaking out about one tweeter is news, surely a U.S. Senator finking on three hundred-plus of his constituents also must be?”

TWITTER FILES #16
Comic Interlude: A Media Experiment pic.twitter.com/Knp0UjfaMp

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023

Taibbi proceeded to reveal that Maine Sen. Angus King, an Independent who votes with the Democrats, sought to silence accounts critical of him by warning Twitter moderators they were “suspicious.” But Taibbi noted that King’s evidence the accounts should be taken down involved such mundane reasons as “Rand Paul visit excitement,” “Bot (averages 20 tweets a day),” being followed by King’s rival Eric Brakey, and one that merely “mentions immigration.”

“If Dick Nixon sniffed glue, this is what his enemies list might have looked like,” quipped Taibbi.

The 2019 request from the Trump White House came after Trump tweeted about “boring” musician John Legend and his “filthy-mouthed” wife, Teigen. Teigen responded with a crude reply referencing Trump’s infamous “Access Hollywood” tape.

Although the White House asked Twitter to take down Teigen’s tweet, the platform did not.

Taibbi also cited State Department official Mark Lenzi, who wrote Twitter on official letterhead to demand that 14 accounts that were skeptical of the Trump-Russia collusion claims that Special Counsel Robert Mueller later determined were groundless.

“The below are some Russian controlled accounts that I think you will want to look into and delete,” Lenzi wrote.

Taibbi, whose prior Twitter Files reports have shown Rep. Adam Schiff, (D-CA), frequently sought to have tweets he disagreed with taken down, said the press is interested in angles with a celebrity component but misses the larger point of systematic violation of American citizens’ First Amendment rights.

“The fact that mainstream outlets ignored the Schiff story but howled about Teigen shows what they’re about,” Taibbi wrote. “Responses like this are designed to keep blue-leaning audiences especially focused on moronic partisan spats, obscuring bigger picture narratives.”