A Libyan emergency room doctor who treated Stevens said Libyan security guards brought him to the hospital at 1 a.m., his lips black and his body reeking of smoke.
He was officially pronounced dead at 1:45 a.m. from smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning, but the doctor who tried to revive him, Ziad Bouzaid, 31, said Stevens was dead on arrival. Bouzaid said the body bore no other signs of injury.
http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/09/13/4256936/no-protest-before-benghazi-attack.html
Well, judging by the photographs of his body being paraded triumphantly along the street while the Libyans snapped cell phone photos of it, I’d say the “no other injuries” part is a lie.
Maybe the other injuries didn’t kill him, but he clearly has scrapes and bleeding all over him.
I suspect that what happened is that the Libyans dragged him out, hauled him around and possibly attempted to sodomize him (probably with a stick or some object) to express disrespect, or at any rate abused his body if he was already dead, and then as they were jubilantly parading him along the street, some armed party arrived with a car and got his body away from them and brought him to the hospital.
Even if he had been alive when they dragged him through that opening in the wall, he was clearly dead in the later photographs (where some of the Libyans can be seen hopping up and down and grabbing their crotches in a gesture of contempt). And since he was dead, he was no longer of any use to them, so when somebody on our side appeared, they dumped his body and it was taken to the hospital.
In my opinion, that would account for the initial confusion over how he was brought to the hospital and the victory-lap photos that we have seen.