Hours before a scheduled press conference today outside City Hall by family members of a Baltimore sanitation worker who died of heat stroke, Mayor Brandon Scott announced the hiring of a high-priced D.C. law firm to conduct a review of city practices “specifically as they pertain to heat safety.”

The attorney who organized the event for loved ones to share memories of Ronald Silver II, who collapsed and died on the job in sweltering heat, called the mayor’s announcement suspect and its timing an attempt to distract the public from the role that the Department of Public Works may have played in the tragedy.

“It is strange that the city would hire its own investigator when there is a Maryland state agency as well as the Baltimore Police Department conducting investigations,” said former deputy attorney general Thiru Vignarajah, who has been representing the family since the August 2 incident.

“That is what guilty parties do – hire their own investigator when they’re in cover-up mode,” Vignarajah said at the press conference. “Not what public officials and public agencies do when they’re trying to get to the bottom of what really happened.”

“The family finds it a touch offensive,” Vignarajah added, ushering Silver’s fiancée, Renee Garrison, up to the microphone...