We should all have a healthy skepticism of the police account of events, but keeping your brain on conspiracy-mode all the time isn’t productive.

I mean, that's what the "might be the fall guy" position here is, as far as I'm concerned. "The fall guy" doesn't need to mean some brilliant construction the cops set up to take the blame. It can just mean they made some stuff up under pressure or warped the facts to suit a narrative and we shouldn't take all of the news about this at face value.

We're dealing with institutions that pathologically lie. They don't lie 100% of the time, but they do lie shamelessly. Whatever comes from this, they're not going to want the takeaway to be that they are incapable of catching someone who would do a thing like this, which gives them motive to rush to a conclusion and pin it on someone.

We're also dealing with the same country that did MKUltra. I understand not wanting to go for wild conspiracies with no grounding, but the US has been known to actually do stuff that sounds completely made up.