Kept digging and punched in i1.wp.com in Google and came up with this article ont he WP Jetpack
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/images-broken-i1wpcom-prefix-is-being-appended

turns out Jetpack Photon plugin tries to create a cache of your photos for a good reason and long story short creates broken links sometimes. The article above has you deactivate the plugin in Jetpack… works like a charm…