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FOLLOW-UP: Ex-cops sentenced in deadly botched raid
Former Atlanta officers stormed into 92-year-old woman's house, killed her
ATLANTA - Three former Atlanta police officers who each pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge in connection with the death of an elderly woman during a botched drug raid were sentenced Tuesday to federal prison terms.
Jason R. Smith, Gregg Junnier and Arthur Tesler received sentences ranging from five years to 10. Kathryn Johnston, 92, was killed by police gunfire during the 2006 raid.
Police used a "no-knock" warrant to enter Johnston's house to look for drugs. But prosecutors said officers found none and tried to cover up the mistake by planting baggies of marijuana.
U.S. District Judge Julie E. Carnes sentenced Smith to 10 years in federal prison. She sentenced Junnier to six years and Tesler to five years.
The three earlier had each pleaded guilty on the federal charge of violating Johnston's civil rights.
Smith and Junnier also pleaded guilty to state charges, including manslaughter. They are set to be sentenced on those charges next month.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29369806/
Tearful ex-Atlanta cops apologize for killing
By BILL RANKIN
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, February 23, 2009
Three disgraced and tearful former Atlanta cops apologized Monday for the botched drug raid that left terrified 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston shot dead by police bullets.
One by one, former officers Gregg Junnier, Jason Smith and Arthur Bruce Tesler — all wearing jail jumpsuits and leg irons — stood before a federal judge and discussed their roles in the events leading up to the shooting and the cover-up afterward. Tesler disputed some details of the prosecution’s account of his role.
On Monday, family, friends, pastors and former colleagues praised the former officers for being supportive husbands, caring parents and dedicated public servants.
But throughout it all, Johnston’s presence loomed. Her photo was displayed on a large screen hanging from a courtroom wall and on the video monitors facing the three defendants.
On Nov. 21, 2006, Smith falsified an affidavit to obtain a no-knock search warrant allowing narcotics officers to batter down Johnston’s door. Apparently thinking she was being invaded, Johnston fired a shot from an old rusty revolver through the door. Officers responded with 39 rounds. Five or six struck and killed her.
Kelly Hill, who took Johnston on errands, recalled her friend as independent, vibrant and sharp-witted.
“She lived a life of quiet dignity and pride,” said Hill, her voice breaking. “She’ll always be remembered for the disgusting way she died. She didn’t deserve it.”
Sentencing guidelines recommend that Smith serve 12 years and seven months in prison and that Junnier and Tesler serve 10 years and one month.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jon-Peter Kelly told Carnes that Junnier provided “almost unprecedented” cooperation by coming to the FBI three weeks after the raid and saying what really happened at 933 Neal St. For this reason, he asked Carnes to sentence Junnier to five or six years in prison.
Because Smith also cooperated, Kelly recommended his time be cut by almost two years. Tesler’s sentence should stay the same if Carnes finds he has truly accepted responsibility, Kelly said.
Tesler said when he joined the narcotics unit, he was told to “sit, watch and learn” from superiors who cut corners to meet performance quotas for arrests and warrants. “I was a new part and plugged into a broken system,” Tesler said.
Tesler said when he saw Smith about to plant baggies of marijuana inside Johnston’s home to make it look like a drug house, he shook his head in disapproval. Tesler said he falsified the police report and later lied about the raid because Smith told him to follow the cover-up script. Tesler said he wasn’t about to “rat” on a senior officer.
His father, Jack Tesler, said his son was “being vilified and over-prosecuted.”
Smith said his moral compass failed when he began to think “drug dealers were no longer human.”
“I saw myself above them,” he said.
As for his actions in the Johnston case, Smith said, “There is no excuse for my conduct.”
Junnier, the most experienced member of the unit, told Carnes that he always told his son and daughter to tell the truth.
“I broke that [rule] myself,” he said, sobbing. “It’s hard to try to even face them now and say that.”
Junnier said that while he didn’t write the falsified warrant, he did nothing to correct it. If so, he said, “it probably wouldn’t have been served and Ms. Johnston would be here today.”
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/atlanta/stories/2009/02/23/johnston_sentencing.html?cxntlid=homepage_tab_newstab
UPDATE: Cop Who Shoved Cyclist Fired by NYPD, Faces 4 Year Sentence
http://planetsave.com/blog/2009/02/20/cop-who-shoved-cyclist-fired-by-nypd-faces-4-year-sentence/
Police Assault Woman Who Called for Help; Sue News Station Who Exposes Them
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2009/02/police-assault-woman-who-called-for.html
New Orleans U.S. Atty. Says 2 FBI Agents Should Be Immuned From Brutality Lawsuit
By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Orleans insists two FBI agents should have immunity under the law from a lawsuit involving a videotaped beating of a retired school teacher.
The teacher, Robert Davis, has filed a civil rights suit against New Orleans police officers and the the two agents Stephen Noh and Trent Miley.
In a motion filed Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten’s office stated that because they were federal agents on the job, “Under the Federal Tort Claims Act, defendants Miley and Noh are improper defendants.”
“Therefore, a federal officer acting under the color of the law, such as defendants Noh and Miley are not subject to suit,” the motion said.
Davis’ lawsuit alleges that on Oct. 8, 2005 he was walking through the French Quarter and asked an officer about a curfew. After that, police officers and the FBI agents forced him to the ground and punched him repeatedly.
http://www.ticklethewire.com/2009/02/19/new-orleans-us-atty-says-2-fbi-agents-should-be-immuned-from-brutality-lawsuit/
Bowling to return to bench after drug charges
2/14/2009
ROSE COOPER
County Editor
Clinton County Juvenile Court Magistrate Roger Bowling will soon be back on the bench.
Bowling, 58, who was charged Dec. 9 with two misdemeanor charges of possession of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia, appeared Jan. 23 in Hillsboro Municipal Court where the case was transferred after Clinton County Municipal Court Judge Chad L. Carey stepped aside. Judge David McKenna, of Hillsboro Municipal Court, and Prosecutor Fred Beery, brought the case against Bowling.
A spokesperson in the Clinton County Municipal Court said the possession of drug paraphernalia was dismissed with prejudice under a plea agreement. For the possession of marijuana charge, the court ordered a $158 bond forfeiture.
A Wilmington resident, Bowling was charged after Wilmington police executed a search warrant at his home for illegal narcotics. Police detectives found marijuana, marijuana seeds and stems, pipes with residue, rolling papers and burnt marijuana cigarettes, according to a media release from the Wilmington Police Department.
At the time the charges were filed, police said anonymous tips led to a three-month investigation. During the investigation, detectives “developed probable cause,” said police, prompting the issuance of the search warrant.
After he was charged, Bowling was removed from the bench and initially placed on paid administrative leave, according to Clinton County Juvenile Court Administrator David Hockaday.
Clinton County Probate Judge Allen Gano said Bowling was later placed on leave without pay.
Judge Gano said Bowling has gone through the steps required under the county’s drug policy. “The drug policy urges us to take steps to rehabilitate,” he said.
Bowling began rehabilitation “on his own initiative,” Gano said. “He was taking the steps that fit into the county policy. We followed that from the beginning. I’m pleased with the way he has dealt with it. I’m satisfied at the sincerity of his efforts. As the county policy would have us do, he will get a second chance,” the judge said.
There was never an indication in any of Bowling’s work performance there was a problem, Gano said.
Bowling is expected to return to the bench at the end of February or beginning of March. “This is the right thing to do under the circumstances,” Gano said. “After a good deal of consideration and discussion with him, it was an appropriate decision. He’s done the rehabilitation and I’m satisfied he will be able to perform.”
Gano said the magistrate’s decisions are always reviewed by the judge.
Bowling has served as a Clinton County magistrate for more than 10 years.
As juvenile court magistrate, Bowling oversees a number of juvenile cases, most of them traffic offenses, said Hockaday. Bowling also handles a variety of other cases, including juvenile misdemeanor drug cases.
http://www.wnewsj.com/main.asp?SectionID=49&SubSectionID=156&ArticleID=173600&TM=5956.138
Mumbai man: FBI women abused me
February 14, 2009, 22:35
An alleged terrorist captured in the aftermath of the Mumbai bombings has blamed a three-member FBI team from the U.S. of sexually harassing him during an interrogation. Terror suspect Faheem Ansari leveled sexual harassment allegations against a female FBI agent who he claims interrogated him in Mumbai.
Ansari, who is currently in the custody of the Mumbai Crime Branch, had his lawyer, Ejaz Naqvi, file the complaint before an Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate alleging that a female FBI agent, who had interrogated him, had "sexually harassed him all through the night."
"Faheem had been interrogated by three FBI officers in which one of them, a lady officer, had sexually abused him," Naqvi told the court. Naqvi alleged that the "white woman" and two other foreigners sexually abused him, leaving bruises on his genitals.
The complaint also made a request for Faheem to be sent for a medical checkup as he has developed "itches and wounds in his private parts and all over his body".
In court, Naqvi did not elaborate on the nature of the "sexual harassment." But speaking to reporters outside court, he said that when he met his client in the police lock-up, Faheem had said the woman agents, in the course of the interrogation, showed him obscene pictures and videos.
"I suspect the woman was from the FBI," said Naqvi, adding that Ansari claims the involvement of pornographic movies, as well as serious foreplay.
Ansari, a devout Muslim, believes that the whole incident amounts to torture because it is forbidden by Islam, his religion.
However, given the notorious incidents at Abu Ghraib in which women officers were found to have abused Iraqi male prisoners, Ansari has made a potentially serious charge.
Background Information on Ansari
Faheem Ansari, a suspect in the Mumbai attacks that killed 173 people last November, was arrested along with five other suspects. Police say Ansari has confessed to performing reconnaissance for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist group that conducted the deadly attacks.
Ansari and his alleged associate, Sabauddin Ahmed, are in the custody of the Crime Branch until February 17. The agency is investigating whether the duo were responsible for providing data regarding locations targeted by terrorists during the Mumbai attacks.
Both were arrested in 2008 in connection with the 2007 New Years Eve attack on a CRPF camp in Rampur in Uttar Pradesh.
However, 35-year-old Ansari had told his interrogators that he was asked by Pakistan's ISI to identify all the locations on Googlemap.com that were later terror targets.
The FBI has questioned Mohammad Ajmal Amir Iman Kasab, the lone Lashker-e-Taiba militant involved in the November 26 terror strikes, for over nine hours to ascertain his role and who his handlers were in Pakistan.
Ansari also reportedly told his interrogators that he was shown Mumbai in the Google earth map and was asked to point out important places in Mumbai. The incident occurred at Baitul Mujahideen camp, located near Shivai Nallah in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir.
Fahim added that his camp commander, identified as Kahafa, was keen to know about the availability of taxis near DGP's office, the height of the airport wall, wire fencing and the location of the aircraft runway from the nearest building.
Faheem Not In Touch With Family
Family members of alleged terrorist Ansari revealed that he had not been in touch with his family during the past year and the family had planned to lodge a missing person's complaint with Dubai police.
However, Faheem's eldest sister-in-law, Saba Ansari, told Mid-Day newspaper that he has been framed. Saba also added that she was not sure what "the arrested persons’ face. Moreover, the claims of him being a Pakistani are baseless," Saba said.
The family has lived in Motilal Nagar, Goregaon, near Mumbai, for the past 40 years. "Our family is one of the respected ones in the area," she added.
Ansari, who lived together with family members, including his five elder brothers, worked at Al Biladh printing press in Dubai. Seeking a better life, he had gone to Dubai to join one of his brothers in the printing business.
FBI Has No Right To Interrogate, Says Terrorist
Ansari, who had earlier filed an application seeking action against the city police for allegedly allowing the FBI to interrogate him, has now turned to the Mumbai High Court seeking an order to restrain the US agency.
The Crime Branch will have to file their reply on whether any foreign investigating agencies like the FBI had been allowed to interrogate the accused during the investigation of the terror attacks.
The lawyer has contended that there was no legal provision that allows foreign investigation agencies to interrogate persons arrested by the police in India.
"According to Indian law, no foreign agency can be allowed to interrogate an Indian suspect and we have sought relief from the court," his lawyer Naqvi said.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the U.S. investigating agency, is handling part of the probe due to the death of American citizens in the November 26-29 carnage in Mumbai.
The FBI has registered its involvement in the investigation of the Mumbai attacks, as U.S. laws require the agency to file charges in case of the death or torture of any American national outside the country.
Lawyer Says Ansari is Innocent
Naqvi says even if his client Ansari had prepared the maps, which the prosecution contended was given to LeT operatives, he was not aware of what it would be used for or its purpose.
"The one who made the maps is not the accused, the one who misused it should be the accused." Naqvi added that the terror attack occurred in November and at that time his client was lodged in a jail in Uttar Pradesh.
"An accused cannot be tried in two different cases in different states. It amounts to double jeopardy. Faheem is at present in judicial custody in the UP case and also here he is in police custody. We will approach the High Court objecting to this," Naqvi said in a statement.
A Possible Attempt To Derail Investigation?
Pradeep Samant, a High Court lawyer from Mumbai believes that the bizarre allegations could be an attempt by Ansari to derail the investigation. "I believe such acts are merely done to evoke public sympathy."
"The allegations against the FBI are serious and it is only later that they may be proven. But right now they are serving the purpose of shifting the attention from the actual case," Samant added.
When asked about the possible aftermath of this case, Samant said it is the first time the FBI has been involved such a case. "Right now Indian law is not capable of dealing with it and we might need special laws to tackle the case."
Samant, who practices criminal law, also said that Indian law does not allow foreign investigating agency, such as the FBI, to interrogate Indian suspects. "It is against the law."
Bhawna Sharma, another lawyer from Delhi, said "I am not aware of any such incident earlier in India where an accused has blamed a foreign investigating officer of sexual harassment. Had this case been in the U.S., the accused would have sued the officer and won huge amounts of money in lawsuits. But since the nationalities are in conflict here, we will have to wait and watch."
Sharma also added that sexual harassment in Indian law is dealt with using labor laws and most cases in India have been filed by women victims. This case comes under "Third party harassment" - where sexual harassment occurs as a result of an action or mission by any third party or outsider, employer or person in charge will take all necessary and reasonable steps to assist the affected person in terms of support and preventive action.
In India, it has been only six years since sexual harassment was recognised as a human rights violation by The Supreme Court as well as a gender based systematic discrimination that affects a woman’s Right to Life and Livelihood.
"All laws in India related to sexual harassment refer to the word "women." It's the first case where any male has filed such a complaint. We might need more laws about this," Sharma added.
U.S. Law
In the United States, inmates and others held in custody have the right to sue, charging sexual harassment. The inmate could sue for damages under Federal statute 42 U.S.C. §1983. A lawsuit brought under this law is based upon a claim that a governmental entity deprived the individual of a constitutional right.
Nidhi Sharma for RT
http://russiatoday.com/features/news/37313
Deputy who fired shots in wrong house acted 'reasonably and lawfully'
The Dakota County Attorney has concluded that a Scott County deputy's actions were "reasonable and lawful" when he accidentally broke into the wrong house and fired several shots in the direction of a man who had done nothing wrong.
The information is contained in a press release emailed to KARE 11 Wednesday night by the Scott County Sheriff's Department.
On January 4, Deputy Marcus Hoffer responded to a call of domestic assault at a home in New Market Township.
Hoffer found two buildings on the property when he arrived -- a split level house and what appeared to be an empty pole barn.
The press release says Deputy Hoffer repeatedly banged on the door of the house, identified himself as a deputy, and eventually, when no one answered, forced his way inside.
He immediately spotted a man with a gun at the top of the stairs, and according to authorities, again identified himself as a deputy.
When the man appeared to raise his weapon, Deputy Hoffer fired five shots and left the house to wait for help.
The men inside were eventually arrested with no further incident.
The press release from Scott County quotes Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom as saying "given the limited information Deputy Hoffer had as he responded to the domestic call and the urgency of the situation, it was reasonable for Deputy Hoffer to assume that the domestic was or had occurred at the single family residence."
Backstrom also concluded the deputy lawfully fired his weapon, fearing for his own safety or that of others.
At the time, the man in the house, Justin Friedges, told KARE 11 the whole thing caught him and his brother off guard, and he didn't believe the man banging on his door was a deputy.
Click here to see KARE's original story.
"I was just watching TV and then the guy comes banging on the door. Just sounds crazy. Just screaming open the door," Friedges said in January. "I was screaming get out. 911. I just barely got my head out and see a shadow of a guy and then a gun flash," Friedges said.
Friedges claimed at the time the deputy did not identify himself as a deputy until after firing shots.
Backstrom concluded otherwise.
According to Sheriff Kevin Studnicka, it was later discovered that the original domestic dispute call, made from a cell phone, came from the other building that was near the home at the same address.
No one was hurt in either incident.
http://www.kare11.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=539438&catid=2
CAUGHT ON TAPE: Fresno Police Officers Violent Arrest of a Homeless Man
http://www.ksee24.com/news/local/39403357.html?video=YHI&t=a
Two Fresno police officers are under an internal investigation following the release of a video tape obtained by KSEE 24 News showing the officers beating a homeless man.
Drunk cop caused fatal crash
Published: Feb. 8, 2009 at 11:15 AM
NEW YORK, Feb. 8 (UPI) -- An off-duty cop was intoxicated when he drove his vehicle into a young couple crossing a New York street, killing one and injuring the other, sources allege.
The unidentified sources said Officer Martin Abreu of Jersey City, N.J., was facing criminal charges Sunday after an early Saturday traffic accident that left law school graduate Marilyn Huang Feng dead, the New York Post reported.
Feng and her boyfriend, hedge-fund analyst Dennis Loffredo, were allegedly hit by Abreu's car in New York's financial district. Police said the collision killed Feng, 26, immediately and left Loffredo, also 26, in critical but stable condition.
Abreu, who had no reported injuries, was arraigned Saturday night on charges of driving while intoxicated and aggravated vehicular homicide.
Loffredo's mother, Diane, told the Post Feng was to have started a new job Monday.
"She was hoping to just make her life better in the (United States)," she told the newspaper.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/02/08/Sources_Drunk_cop_caused_fatal_crash/UPI-19161234109741/
(Same cop did this 6 months earlier)
Police shots kill woman
Officers say she appeared to be stabbing herself
By DAWN WITHERS
The Salinas Californian
A Salinas woman was killed by Salinas police early Sunday morning after two officers believed she was lunging at one with of them with a knife or a ice pick.
Maria Irma De La Torre, 45, was shot twice in the torso around 3:45 a.m. by a police officer outside her home at 1143 East Laurel Drive. The officers have been placed on four days administrative leave pending an investigation.
"It's a wrongful death," said Diana Hernandez, De La Torre's niece, who added De La Torre suffered from epileptic seizures but had no history of violence or hurting herself during seizures. She was taking medication to control the seizures, Hernandez said.
De La Torre, Hernandez said, was a shy woman born in Michoacán, Mexico, but lived in Salinas "forever and a day." Hernandez said she was devoted to church and her family and because of her epilepsy was unable to work.
"It's grief everywhere," Hernandez said describing the family's mood. "My aunt, she didn't harm anyone, she was the kindest person."
According to information from the Salinas Police Department, officers responded to a 9-1-1 call "involving a woman acting strangely" at the residence.
Cmdr. Kelly McMillin said the officers thought their lives were endangered and reacted to protect their lives. De La Torre did not show any signs of having a seizure, McMillin said, and was unresponsive when police tried to talk to her.
"This is pure tragedy," McMillin said. "No one is happy the way this happened."
It is the first officer-involved shooting this year and the second since January 2007, McMillin said. The shooting last year didn't result in any injuries.
When the two officers arrived they found De La Torre sitting in a minivan in front of her home "stabbing herself in the neck with a small implement." She moved from the driver's seat to the passenger seat as the officers tried to remove her from the car, according to police.
The officers, who are not being named, had difficulty trying to restrain De La Torre while in the van, McMillin said, and claim De La Torre lunged at one of the officers with what they thought was a knife or ice pick, causing one of the officers to fire his Taser and the other officer to fire his gun shooting the woman twice.
The entire incident took place in less than 10 minutes, McMillin said, and the officers independently made the same decision to draw their weapons to stop De La Torre, one choosing his Taser, the other his gun.
McMillin said it turned out De La Torre had a metal crochet hook in her hand, not a knife or ice pick, and it isn't clear if it was the same item she used to stab herself.
De La Torre was taken to Natividad Medical Center and Hernandez said the family was notified of her death around 9 a.m. Sunday.
Police were still outside De La Torre's small green house Sunday afternoon with yellow crime scene tape blocking the driveway.
Hernandez, who did not see the shooting, said De La Torre had been sick in recent days following another death in the family and that her husband, Jose Licea, called Hernandez's mother, Hilda Hernandez, around 1 a.m. Sunday saying De La Torre was unwell and needed to go to the hospital.
Hilda headed over to De La Torre's house and called 9-1-1, Hernandez said, only to request an ambulance, not any police officers.
McMillin said the call that came to police was of a woman acting erratically and people who call emergency services can't request only an ambulance because medics won't to go an emergency that may be unsafe until police have secured it.
When police arrived, Hernandez said, they told Hilda to "move out of the way" so they could get to De La Torre, Hernandez said. Her mother, she said, didn't see the shooting but later called Hernandez saying, "They killed her! They killed her!"
Licea, Hernandez said, did see the incident and the officer who shot his wife. The family, she said, is hiring a lawyer to look into the shooting.
"She was handicapped," Hernandez said. "They could have Tased her."
McMillin declined to comment on the specifics of what was said at the scene, adding that police have several independent witness statements corroborating the officers' account and the evidence that's been gathered from De La Torre's home.
Family members are coming to Salinas from Texas and Mexico. Hernandez said memorial services will likely be held this week.
http://www.forumgarden.com/forums/current-events/38593-cops-kill-woman-stabbing-herself-crochet-hook.html
[Now how the hell do you perceive that you have been shot?]
Few details in Salinas police shooting
One Salinas officer says he thought he had been shot before opening fire
BY JACK FOLEY • The Salinas Californian • February 6, 2009
"He saw what he perceived as a threat and thought he was shot, and based on that both officers discharged their firearms," said Dino Bardoni, commander of investigations.
No one was hurt in the 11:24 p.m. incident at North Sanborn Road and Freedom Parkway, but the couple's SUV was riddled with bullet holes and its rear window was shattered.
Police are releasing few details about the incident or case and have characterized it as a "priority investigation," Bardoni said.
It's the fourth officer-involved shooting in the city in the past seven months, two of which were fatal.
Interim Police Chief Daniel Ortega refused to discuss the most recent case, referring all questions to Bardoni.
Bardoni said the incident began when one officer stopped the vehicle because one of its license plate lights was not working. He was joined shortly thereafter by a second officer.
Bardoni said the primary officer was in the midst of contacting the vehicle's occupants, a driver and passenger, when the problem began.
"He was walking up to them, nothing out of the ordinary," Bardoni said, when there was the perception of a threat and the officer thought he'd been shot.
Police later determined that the couple was unarmed.
Neither of the vehicle's occupants was arrested or cited.
The couple, Adrianna Velasquez and Julio Fernandez, could not be reached for comment.
Bardoni declined to identify the officers or to confirm or deny that one of them is the same officer who was involved in the tragic shooting death last year of Maria Irma Del La Torre, 45, of Salinas.
She was shot and killed when officers mistook a knitting needle for an ice pick and said she lunged at them. De La Torre was taking medication for epileptic seizures at the time of her death.
Contact Jack Foley at jfoley@thecalifornian.com
http://thecalifornian.com/article/20090206/NEWS01/902060302/1002
Boston Cop Accused Of Escorting Porn Stars To Club
Boston Cop Accused Of Using Cruiser To Escort Gay Porn Stars From Airport To Nightclub
BOSTON, Feb. 6, 2009
(AP) A Boston police officer is being investigated for allegedly helping two gay porn stars cut through traffic to get to a nightclub. Police said the officer, whose name has not been released, has been placed on desk duty for allegedly using his cruiser to escort a car from Logan International Airport to the Roxy nightclub last October.
A law enforcement official close to the investigation confirmed Friday the escort was for Aden and Jordan Jaric, a couple from Sacramento, Calif., who perform in live strip shows and pornography as "Brangelina." The official was not authorized to speak about the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity.
A phone listing for the Jarics could not immediately be found.
Boston police learned of the alleged escort after a photo of a police cruiser in one of Boston's highway tunnels, along with comments about the trip, were posted on a blog.
The night after the Jarics were at the Roxy, they performed a show at a Providence, R.I., male nude club called Trixx All Male Revue.
Providence police uncovered the photograph while investigating a report of explicit sexual activity at the Trixx show. When they realized the photo was of a Boston police cruiser, they contacted the city, the law enforcement official said.
The official said it appears the officer escorted the men from Logan airport to the Roxy, but not to Providence.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/02/06/ap/strange/main4781441.shtml
'Shocking' video shows cops grabbing cash during raid
David Edwards
Published: Monday February 2, 2009
The New York City Police Department has launched an internal probe to investigate a raid on a Staten Island bar. In a video posted on YouTube, police officers wearing jackets decorated with the NYPD logo can be seen smashing gambling machines at the "Beer Goggles" bar and putting confiscated cash into their pockets.
"A shocking video showing NYPD cops raiding a bar, smashing gambling machines and shoving confiscated cash into their pockets has become an Internet hit and led to an internal probe of the officers involved," The New York Post reports.
Criminal Justice editor Murray Weiss continues, "No official determination has been made as to whether cops were simply doing their jobs during the Nov. 14, 2007, raid on Beer Goggles, a troubled bar on Staten Island, or if they had more sinister motives. But they told superiors things were done according to procedure."
According to the paper, "The raiders reported confiscating approximately $700 and arrested three workers for promoting gambling."
An NBC News blog adds, "The surveillance tape popped up on YouTube under the headline 'NYPD corruption at its best.' The video was first screened at a separate departmental trial for Sgt. William Lewis. Many of the police actions were led by Lewis, a 24-year veteran."
"The Internal Affairs Bureau investigated Lewis for five months before suspending him and leveling corruption charges in March," the blog continues. "Several cops from the raiding party testified against him. No decision has yet been reached."
In the video clip below New York Post highlights relevant portions of the original video, broadcast Feb. 2, 2009.
VIDEO: http://rawstory.com/news/2008/NYPD_pockets_cash_confiscated_in_bar_0202.html
FOLLOW UP: Deadly Force
What a SWAT team did to Cheye Calvo's family may seem extreme. But decades into America's war on drugs, it's business as usual.
Acting on a mistaken drug trafficking suspicion, a SWAT team broke down their door, shot beloved pets and shattered a happy home. Was it an extreme reaction, or business as usual in America's war on drugs?
By April Witt
Sunday, February 1, 2009; Page W08
Payton swung his big, goofy head onto the bed, worked his snout under a pillow and gave a gentle bump. The mayor's wife, nudged awake, opened her eyes and smiled. Payton, the couple's playful No. 1 dog, was letting her know that he and his timid little brother, Chase, needed their morning walk. As the mayor's wife stirred, the two black Labs -- known collectively as "the boys" -- panted and bounded round the bed gleefully. "Get up! Get up! Get up! Get Up!" the boys seemed to be saying. They did this every morning. Inside this sunny red-brick house on a well-tended corner lot in the tiny town of Berwyn Heights in Prince George's County, the family routines were precise from thousands of loving retracings; and they almost all revolved around the boys.
After six years of marriage, Trinity Tomsic and her husband, Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye (sounds like "Shy") Calvo, still hoped for children. As the couple waited, the boys were more than a balm; they were a shared joy. Cheye, 37, and Trinity, 33, had even bought this quaint little house because it had a fenced yard with an expansive lawn where the boys could romp -- dog heaven. On this morning, Tuesday, July 29, Trinity fed the boys by 5 a.m., then planned to take Chase running before walking Payton. Running was the one activity at which shy Chase bested Payton, who had long ago been slowed by a leg injury. "Chase knew we were going to go running before I even had my tennis shoes on," Trinity later recalled. "I don't know how he knew. He just always did."
Trinity snapped Chase in his running harness, then reconsidered. She was a finance officer for the state of Maryland. She had a stack of crucial reports awaiting her approval. Maybe she should just leave for the office now. "I came very close to telling him that we'd have to run later," she recalled. But Chase looked so ridiculously excited that Trinity couldn't stand to disappoint him. "He was jumping up and down, up and down, like, 'We're going to go running! We're going to go running.' It was the best thing to see him so happy."
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And so, they ran out from their tidy house with the pretty mailbox made to match, down familiar streets where they knew neighbors by name and habit, past the home of the sweet old man who always joked when he saw them running: "They went that-a-way." They ran until Trinity tired, and Chase looked back at her with an expression she read as, "Mom, could you speed it up?"
"It's so important to me that we ran," Trinity says now. "I would feel so terrible if, on that last day, the thing he loved most I bailed on because I wanted to get to the office a few minutes early."
***
Payton and Chase spent the day outside together in their fenced run. Weekdays in good weather, they'd loll there until they heard the R12 bus grinding down Edmonston Road -- bringing Trinity's mother home to feed them dinner. Then Payton, 7, would jump up on the fence and bark until Chase, 4, who copied everything Payton did, joined in. On this day, Trinity's mom, Georgia Porter, surprised the boys. She got home an hour early, pulling into the driveway at 5:30 p.m. in the used Toyota she'd bought two days before.
Down the street, a stranger sitting in a parked car noted that a lone female had just arrived at the residence.
Unaware they were being watched, Georgia fed the dogs, then knelt beside the lush organic vegetable garden that Trinity tended meticulously. Georgia, feeling celebratory, wanted to make their favorite summer pasta dish for dinner. She picked cherry tomatoes with one hand while tossing a ball to Chase with the other.
It had been a year since Georgia, 50, had left her lifelong home of Price, Utah -- widowed, jobless, feeling defeated -- and moved in with Cheye and Trinity to try to begin again. It had been hard leaving her rural home, her beloved horses and mountain views, to commute three hours roundtrip daily -- by bus, then Metro, then bus again -- to a job in Takoma Park for a commercial floor estimator. She felt proud of her new used car and what it signified: She was, finally, moving ahead.
The dogs followed Georgia inside. Maneuvering around the kitchen as she cleaned and chopped vegetables, Georgia had to keep stepping over them. She didn't mind. Georgia had bought Chase as a puppy as a surprise gift for Trinity and Cheye. Georgia, who is Greek by heritage, thought of herself as both dogs' "yaya," Greek for grandmother. "They were always right there with me when I cooked," she recalled. "Dogs who are loved like to be right by their people."
At about 6:30 p.m., Cheye came home. He had just one hour to change into shorts, take the boys for their evening walk, change back into business clothes, eat, then head to the town center to chair a community meeting. He'd be gone before Trinity got home. At 33, Cheye had become the youngest mayor ever elected in Prince George's County. It was a part-time job that paid an honorarium of $150 a month. Cheye -- once voted "most school-spirited" in the class of '89 at Riverdale's Parkdale High School -- turned out to be a natural. A policy wonk, he had a passion for the minutiae of local governing. For weeks, he'd been drafting and redrafting a letter laying out precise arguments on why the state should crack down on a developer who had fouled Indian Creek. Tonight, mayors and council members from three neighboring towns were coming to sign Cheye's letter. Cheye was upstairs changing, thinking through the key points of his letter, when the dogs began barking downstairs.
Georgia, talking on the phone as her pasta sauce bubbled on the stove, went to investigate. A man holding a big white box was on the front stoop. Georgia could barely see the man, who seemed, oddly, to be standing off to one side. She noticed a white van at the curb. Deliveryman, she thought. She motioned for the man to leave the box on the stoop.
"Boys!" Cheye called as he came downstairs into the kitchen a few minutes later. He grabbed their leashes from twin hooks. The boys raced to the appointed spot near the back door, sat side by side and waited for Cheye to snap on their leashes. Together they stared up eagerly, tails fanning the kitchen floor in unison.
"We had our routines, and they loved them," Cheye recalled. "They'd plop right down side by side. Payton always on the left, Chase on the right. I loved that little line."
Cheye loved security and stability. In childhood, his family had moved around a lot, primarily in Prince George's, and struggled financially. Creating peace, security and stability not just for Trinity, Georgia and himself, but for all the families of Berwyn Heights, was deeply satisfying to him. He subscribed to the broken-window theory of community-building: If you let little problems slide, big problems follow. People here seemed to like the order. Berwyn Heights enjoyed 30 percent voter turnouts for town elections, a full calendar of community events and one of the lowest crime rates in Prince George's. When one of Berwyn Heights' eight police officers knocked on a homeowner's door to make an inquiry, he just might find himself invited in to dinner. Cheye liked to think of the town, population 3,000, as a diverse modern-day Mayberry.
As Cheye and the boys took an evening constitutional, Cheye waved at the driver of every car that passed. He had a theory about waving; it is psychologically dissonant for drivers to speed if a smiling man walking two cheerful black Labs is standing in the street waving at them.
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Close to home again, Cheye noticed an SUV parked on the left side with a man sitting at the wheel. Cheye waved at the man. Behind that SUV was one with dark tinted windows, and Cheye couldn't make out who was inside.
A few minutes earlier, he'd come across a car parked facing the wrong way on the street. It was in front of a fire hydrant. The motor was running, but Cheye couldn't see anyone inside the car. "That's three violations right there," he recalled thinking. "That's, like, $200 in tickets if you add them all up. I remember thinking: I hope an officer comes by here. We need to ticket that car."
But officers were already there, all around them, watching. And before they left that night, Cheye, Trinity and Georgia would wonder if they could ever feel safe again.
***
"Okay," Cheye said, as he reached his front gate and let Payton and Chase off lead. They raced ahead as Cheye stopped to lift the big white box from the front stoop. It was addressed to Trinity.
"Trinity must have ordered something for the garden," Cheye remembered telling Georgia as he came in the back door. He left the big box on a table in their book-lined living room and went upstairs to change.
It was past 7 p.m., but late sun still streamed through the large kitchen window as Georgia stood at the stove stirring her simmering tomato-artichoke sauce. Georgia turned, catching a glimpse of something out the window that sent a jolt of fear through her. Hooded, armed men, dressed in black, were fanning across the back yard. Still more men, crouching low, moved around the side of the house. Georgia's mind raced to make sense of the strange tableau. Was someone playing an elaborate practical joke?
One of the men spotted Georgia gaping out the window. He lifted his high-powered assault rifle and pointed it directly at her, she recalled. Georgia -- still clutching her wooden spoon -- threw both hands up in the air and screamed. "Cheye, I think it's SWAT!"
Cheye was sitting on the edge of his bed in his boxers. He was just about to put on his black dress socks, when he heard Georgia scream something that made absolutely no sense. He looked out a bedroom window to see armed, masked men running. He was still wondering if they were home invaders when he heard his front door shatter.
In the kitchen, Georgia spun to face the sound of the splintering door. Men in black burst through the front door and into the living room.
Georgia stood trembling in front of the kitchen stove. Payton, who had been stretched out in a corner of the living room farthest from the front door, his head resting near the threshold to the kitchen "turned toward the front door when I turned," Georgia recalled. "He didn't have time to do anything else." Almost instantly, men in black ran forward and shot Payton in the face, Georgia said. "They kept shooting," she recalled. "I didn't know how many times they shot Payton because there was so much gunfire."
"Down on the ground!" Georgia recalled someone screaming at her. She was too terrified to move.
Chase, always timid even when there was nothing to fear, did what he did best -- he ran. He ran away from the men in black, zipped past Georgia at the stove, Georgia recalled. The screaming, running men followed Chase, shooting as he tried escaping into the dining room, Georgia said. She watched in horror as men in black rushed the dining room from all directions. "I could hear Chase whimpering," Georgia said. Then she heard someone shoot at Chase again, she said.
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Men kept yelling at Georgia to get down, but she couldn't budge. "Somebody pushed me on the ground, and they put a gun to my head," she said. Face down on the kitchen floor, Georgia felt someone yank her hands behind her, rip the spoon away and secure her hands. When she lifted her eyes, she could just see Payton's big head resting near the kitchen threshold. He wasn't moving.
"Where are they?" one of the men screamed at Georgia. "Where are they?"
She had no idea what he was talking about. Georgia says she felt the barrel of an assault rifle against her left ear. "Where are they?" a man demanded.
"In the basement?" Georgia remembers saying. Some of the men thundered down the basement steps.
"It was a question, 'In the basement?' Because, if somebody puts a gun to your head and asks you a question, you better come up with an answer. Then I shut my eyes. Oh, God, I thought they were going to shoot me next."
Upstairs, Cheye fell to the bedroom floor at the sound of gunfire. He heard: bang, bang, bang, bang, undecipherable shouts, bang, bang.
"Downstairs!" Cheye heard men call to each other as they began to search the house. Then, more ominously, they yelled: "Upstairs! Upstairs!"
"I'm up here," Cheye recalled calling out. "Please don't shoot. Please don't shoot."
Somebody ordered Cheye to come down. He stood gingerly and peered down the stairwell. "I remember turning and seeing the barrels of two shotguns pointed at me," he said. "I don't know what kind. I'm not a gun person."
"Turn around and walk down the stairs backwards," someone demanded.
So, he did. Clad only in his boxer shorts, the mayor of Berwyn Heights walked slowly down his staircase backwards, his open hands held high. Ever so slowly, he felt for each tread before lowering his weight. "Somewhere around the bottom half of the stairs, someone came to get me," he recalled. "They led me down, pulled my hands down behind my back, bound me with those plastic cuffs very tightly, then pulled me across the living room."
Cheye turned his head and saw Georgia facedown on the kitchen floor. She must be alive, he reasoned, because there was a man holding a gun to her head.
He saw Payton slumped on the living room floor near the threshold to the kitchen. "I knew he was bleeding," Cheye recalled. "I knew he'd been shot. Nothing was processing. I saw Georgia, Payton, blood. No Chase."
Men spun him around and forced him to kneel facing the shattered front door. Behind him, he could hear people ransacking his house. Drawers were yanked out. Cabinets opened and closed. Dazed and sick with terror, he also felt a dawning, helpless grief. All this, for what? Racking his brain for anything they owned worth stealing, all he could think of was Trinity's dual-chamber, rotating garden composter.
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As Cheye knelt, bound and half-naked, on his living room floor, "no one spoke to me about why they were here," Cheye recalled. "No one said, 'Prince George's County police' or 'Prince George's County sheriffs.' They never made that kind of announcement, just simply didn't do it."
Out his ruined front door, Cheye could see that people were gathered on his front lawn. Some wore jackets with official-looking insignias as if they could be police officers in street clothes. "That was my first clue that these men might be law enforcement," he would later recall. "My thought was: If this were a home invasion, people wouldn't just be standing out there on the lawn. They'd be hiding."
It wasn't a home invasion. It was a raid by the Prince George's County Police Department and the county Sheriff's Office. Both agencies declined to discuss specifics of the raid for this story.
At one point, Cheye recalled, he noticed a familiar uniform in the growing crowd on lawn. Berwyn Heights police officer Pvt. Amir Johnson had been patrolling the neighborhood when he passed the mayor's house and saw officers dressed in tactical uniforms coming out the front door. He stopped. (Berwyn Heights and Prince George's police have overlapping jurisdictions within town limits.)
"That is the mayor of Berwyn Heights," Johnson replied.
The detective looked very surprised, Johnson later recalled: "He had that 'Oh, crap' look on his face."
Alarmed, Johnson used his cellphone to notify Berwyn Heights Police Chief Patrick Murphy that, as improbable as it sounded, the Sheriff's Office SWAT team had apparently broken down the mayor's door, shot his dogs and confiscated a box containing 32 pounds of marijuana.
Murphy -- home gardening 54 miles away in St. Mary's County -- sat down, stunned. The 35-year veteran of law enforcement searched his memory for any clue he might have overlooked that the nice young mayor who loved his wife, those two goofy Labs and code enforcement could be involved with drugs. He couldn't come up with anything.
The chief told Johnson to go find their department's second-in-command, Det. Sgt. Ken Antolik, who was moonlighting a few blocks away from Calvo's house at the Blue Bird Driving School, to help him find out what in the heck was going on.
Inside the house, Cheye was starting to ask questions, too.
"Do you have a warrant?" he recalled asking more than once, until someone said:
"It's en route."
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"I kept saying: 'This is a very terrible thing. This is just horrible.' The context in which I told them I was the mayor, I said, 'I'm the mayor of Berwyn heights, and I have to get to a community meeting tonight.' " Finally, one of the deputies, the men in black, nodded to the recently delivered big white box on the living room table and barked accusingly, "Do you know what is in this box?"
"A box," Cheye recalled thinking. "This is about the box?"
Someone shifted Cheye, his hands still bound behind him, into a chair. He could see blood pooling from beneath Payton's head. An officer picked up one of the boys' dog beds and used it to cover Payton's corpse. Cheye asked if they'd killed Chase, too, and someone said that they'd called animal control to remove two dead dogs.
"You shot my dogs," Cheye recalled saying over and over. "You shot my dogs. You shot my dogs. You shot my dogs."
At home in St. Mary's, Murphy dialed the cellphone of his second-in-command, now standing on the mayor's front lawn. Murphy's officer handed the phone to a Prince George's narcotics investigator, Det. Sgt. David Martini.
This is how Murphy later recalled their conversation:
"Martini tells me that when the SWAT team came to the door, the mayor met them at the door, opened it partially, saw who it was, and then tried to slam the door on them," Murphy recalled. "And that at that point, Martini claimed, they had to force entry, the dogs took aggressive stances, and they were shot."
"I later learned," Murphy said in an interview, "that none of that is true."
Martini said he was not free to comment for this article.
***
It was about 7:45 p.m. when Trinity turned her 1997 Suburu Outback with the kayak rack on top onto Edmonston. The road was so jammed with police vehicles that she couldn't reach her driveway. Assuming that the house had been robbed, Trinity abandoned her car and searched frantically for any sign of an ambulance.
"Is my husband okay?" she asked when Ken Antolik met her near her front gate. "Is my mom okay?
"Yes," he told her. "They are in the house.
Then it struck her. It was too quiet. She didn't hear dogs barking. She knew, even before she asked: "Payton and Chase?"
"I'm sorry," he said.
Trinity collapsed against his chest. A female officer eventually came and led her gently around to the back door. Trinity started in to find her husband and mother, then saw blood. There was so much blood. There was blood pooled near the door. Officers were tracking her dead dogs' blood all over the house. She backed outside.
"I remember sitting on the steps thinking, 'I'm never going to be able to live here again,' " Trinity recalled.
"I found something," Georgia heard a detective yell excitedly. The woman held a white envelope filled with cash. Inside, was $68. Across the front of the envelope were written two words: "yard sale."
The detective seemed crestfallen, Georgia said. Georgia, who had been moved, still bound, into the downstairs bedroom, says she overheard the woman saying something like: "It's my first raid, and we got the mayor's house."
Cheye, struggling to understand, pieced together questions officers asked him and comments he overheard. Narcotics investigators for the Prince George's police had apparently left that white box on his front step, then sent SWAT officers from the Sheriff's Office to retrieve it. The box contained marijuana. Officers from the two county law enforcement agencies had apparently been parked watching his house all day. Yet they had apparently done so little investigatory work -- they hadn't even taken 30 seconds to Google Cheye -- that they didn't know they were launching a paramilitary attack on an elected official's home until after they'd broken down the door and shot the dogs. Cheye was particularly disturbed when he discovered that narcotics investigators seemed to have known that criminals had been mailing drugs addressed to innocent people, in hopes of intercepting the packages before the addressees claimed them.
Yet, here he was, hands bound behind him, trying to convince county police that he and Trinity were not drug lords. "Look around," he tried arguing. "We own almost nothing but books. We live on 70 percent of our salary and bank the rest." Do drug lords tend organic gardens and store the decorations for the community's holiday parties in their garage?
In fact, the officers searching his house were unable to find any evidence of drugs other than the box they'd delivered. They didn't find gun caches or, aside from the yard sale money, stacks of cash. Cheye and Trinity didn't have a bong or hookah, not a single rolling paper, stem or seed. Cheye watched their search efforts grow halfhearted, he said.
Nobody seemed to know how to remove the plastic cuffs still binding his and Georgia's hands behind their backs. The deputies from the SWAT team who had put them on were gone. When Georgia and Cheye complained to detectives that the cuffs were cutting off their circulation, they said the detectives just shrugged. After awhile, the officer moved Cheye into the kitchen. From his new vantage, he could see into the dining room. Chase was lying dead in a pool of blood.
The scene at the house was so terrible and odd to Berwyn Heights officer Johnson that he planted himself in the living room. He couldn't see a search warrant posted anywhere. The mayor looked so vulnerable that Johnson wanted to make sure nothing even worse happened to him, such as getting shot. "Not that I didn't trust the police," Johnson would later say. "But I wanted to personally witness what is going to happen to my mayor, so if they try to say this guy went for a gun -- and he didn't -- it's not going to happen on my watch."
When animal control officers finally came for Payton and Chase, Cheye lost it. Payton's big head tumbled limply off the stretcher as they lifted it to take him away. "I roared," Cheye later recalled. "I broke down sobbing." Cheye had named his big boy for the late, great Chicago Bear Walter Payton, whose nickname was "Sweetness." Cheye's Payton ran more like a 350-pound lineman than like Walter Payton. But he was the sweetest, most wonderful dog Cheye had ever known, and strangers were taking him away forever. "My hands were still bound, so I couldn't get my hands to my face as tears just flowed down. I remember turning, and looking away."
Out on the back stoop, it seemed to Trinity that the detectives in their house had shifted into damage control. One pleasant woman, trying to make pleasant conversation, asked Trinity if she and Cheye ever planned to have children.
"All I could think was, Our dogs were our kids, and I can't believe you are asking me that," Trinity recalled. "I let it go and said that we were thinking about adopting."
***
Nearly four hours after the SWAT team broke down the front door, the detectives were ready to leave. Someone had figured out how to cut the cuffs off Cheye and Georgia. They had led Georgia outside to Trinity. Georgia was still so hysterical that she could barely speak.
Cheye says the lead officer at the scene, Prince George's Det. Shawn Scarlata, told him and Trinity that he could haul them all into jail because the box had been addressed to Trinity. But he said he wasn't going to as long as they cooperated. (Scarlata later said he could not comment on the case for this article.)
Johnson stayed to help Cheye lift the splintered door back into its frame and prop it there. There was no way to make the lock work. "I just felt so sorry for them," Johnson recalled. "I didn't know what to say. I told them I'd keep an eye on the house."
Cheye grasped Trinity by the shoulders. "Whatever happens," he said. "I don't want this to affect us." He was a romantic idealist. He had proposed to Trinity at the Jefferson Memorial. But he wasn't naive. This night had been so terrible, Cheye knew that it would change each of them forever in ways they couldn't predict. He felt only a determination not to allow this horror to creep inside their love.
Trinity, sobbing, said nothing could ruin their marriage, but they might have to move. She didn't know if she could live in this house. She didn't think she could stay in Prince George's County. They toured their home room by room. Everything they owned was thrown on the floor, a table or a bed. Their meticulous files had been dumped, the paper scattered. But the blood was the worst.
Exhausted, Cheye telephoned a friend and asked him to come over and help him scrub the blood off the floors. They had to do it for Trinity. It was after 1 a.m. when the two men stopped scrubbing.
Cheye dragged an air mattress into the living room so that he, Trinity and Georgia could huddle together through the night. Nobody slept. Somewhere out there was a drug dealer who might be thinking that they had his box of pot, and they couldn't lock their front door.
About 3:30 a.m., Cheye typed an e-mail on his Treo trying to explain why he wouldn't be coming to the office that morning.
"I'm on the Beltway," Cheye's boss, Rajiv Vinnakota, said, when he called at 7:30 the next morning and said he was on his way. "My only question is, 'Do I bring bagels?' "
Cheye earned his living working for SEED, a District-based educational foundation trying to expand its network of schools to several states. There was no way a drug raid on a mayor's house where police broke down the door and shot the family dogs wouldn't become news. Cheye's boss counseled him to get a lawyer, because innocent people go to jail all the time, and to be proactive about reaching out to the media.
Cheye felt confident that people who knew him and Trinity would know they'd never have anything to do with drugs. But what about everyone else?
As they talked, it dawned on Cheye that police hadn't just killed his dogs, terrorized his family and destroyed his once-happy, pretty home. They might just have ruined his life.
By mid-morning, Cheye had agreed to let a television reporter tour the house and had sent a mass e-mail to everyone he knew and the entire town of Berwyn Heights' mailing list.
"We try to make sense of it," Cheye wrote in the e-mail. "They invaded our home and killed our dogs! That above all else, can't be undone."
The Berwyn Heights annual employee-appreciation luncheon was scheduled for noon. Cheye went, feeling unsteady from lack of sleep and wondering if he were still in shock. He sat next to Murphy, who Cheye felt was acting cool toward him.
"I'm always highly suspicious because of all the things I've seen in 35 years in law enforcements," the chief later said. "Sometimes, I look at the priest in church, and I wonder what his thing is, which isn't all that healthy. But there's always a suspicion there. At the same time, I think I'm a pretty good judge of character."
Cheye, he concluded, couldn't have been the criminal the county detective had described on the phone.
As Cheye implemented his plan to let people know that they were innocent, Trinity labored to make their house minimally habitable. Her father -- Georgia's first husband -- flew in from Wyoming to help. One of the first things they did was throw away the blood-soaked dining room rug.
At bedtime, Trinity and Cheye stared at each other. Trinity had always gone upstairs first, leaving Cheye reading downstairs, Chase at his feet. Payton had always followed Trinity, crept onto Cheye's side on the bed, snoozed until he heard him coming, then jumped down guiltily. Now their hearts sank, not just at all they'd lost, but at how everything either of them said or did, anyplace they looked in the house, was a reminder.
They got into bed, but kept the lights on. Trinity was afraid now to sleep in the dark. After a few minutes, Cheye got up and turned off the fan. They wanted to be able to hear in case someone broke in again.
***
The first news reports on the raid at the Berwyn Heights mayor's house quoted spokesmen for the Prince George's police saying that the mayor and his family remained "persons of interest" in an ongoing drug-smuggling investigation. Police said they became aware of the box addressed to Trinity when a drug-sniffing dog had alerted them to it at a package hub, and authorities notified the county police. A police spokesman told reporters that Prince George's narcotics investigators had sought, and been granted, a "no-knock" warrant before searching Cheye and Trinity's house. Maryland law authorizes police to request a no-knock warrant, one intended to be served by force and unannounced, if they have a "reasonable suspicion" that evidence would be destroyed or officers' lives placed in danger if they knocked on a suspect's door and demanded entry.
Those same news reports quoted law enforcement officials around the region saying it was a known tactic of traffickers to ship a package containing drugs to an innocent stranger's home, planning to retrieve it before the recipient opened the box. In fact, law enforcement officials told reporters, recent incidents in College Park and Dunn Loring had been foiled when surprised innocents alerted police after opening the packages before the dealers could snatch them. Cheye was flabbergasted. Given that, how could the police who had broken down his front door with a battering ram, terrorized his family and killed his dogs not at least have considered the possibility, even the likelihood, that he might be innocent?
On Friday, Aug. 1 -- 71 hours after the raid -- the lead detective, Scarlata, returned to their home. He came alone. Cheye met him at the fence. The detective handed Cheye the warrant he had first asked to see while handcuffed in his living room. Scarlata also gave Cheye a list of what they'd confiscated in the raid. It consisted of a single item: the box police had brought there in the first place.
After the detective left, Cheye studied the document. There was nothing anywhere to indicate that Scarlata had asked the judge who signed it for permission to break his door down for a no-knock search. He hadn't presented the judge with evidence that anyone in the household was armed and dangerous. He'd basically said that police had intercepted a box of drugs addressed to Trinity, delivered the box and watched as it was taken inside.
The tomatoes still hung ripe and sweet in the garden. The sun still streamed prettily through the kitchen window. The thought still came to Cheye each time he walked through the kitchen: I need to fill the boys' water bowl. Then he remembered. Everything had changed. He left the water bowl unfilled where it had always sat. He left the leashes hanging on two hooks by the back door.
The first Saturday after the raid, during that happy stretch of time when Cheye would have taken his dogs on an extra-long walk looking for would-be speeders to wave at, there was now a void so large that he was only beginning to take its measure. Trinity was downstairs, still trying to right the house, when she heard a strange and terrible sound. She raced upstairs to find Cheye, sitting naked on the shower floor, letting the water stream over his head as he sobbed.
"I just want to walk my dogs," he told her. "I just want to walk my dogs."
Trinity's father had to leave Sunday afternoon to go back to Wyoming. He spent his last day with them scrubbing the front walk. He scrubbed until he'd erased the last traces of the blood that had dripped there as animal control had carried the boys away. In late afternoon, Cheye and Trinity were driven to a local ballpark where Berwyn Heights activists had organized a community rally to support them. Rally organizers presented Cheye and Trinity with a banner signed by hundreds of people who had written messages of support and encouragement. Speaker after speaker expressed certainty that the mayor and his family were innocent and outrage at the death of the dogs. Police Chief Murphy was angry that Prince George's police hadn't given him the courtesy of notifying him before their raid, allowing him to help them execute their search warrant peacefully and avert tragedy. "I never imagined, when I set out to protect people from the crooks and the criminals, that I would have to protect them from my fellow police officers," Murphy told the crowd.
Cheye thanked the townspeople he'd served for five years as mayor. "Injustice in this county, in this country, in this world happens every day," he said. "But people who experience it most often don't have the support, don't have the community, don't have the resources that we do."
***
Cheye and Trinity flipped channels waiting for the 5 o'clock news, certain that -- finally -- they would be officially cleared. It was Wednesday, Aug. 7, more than a week after the raid. Then-Prince George's Police Chief Melvin C. High and Sheriff Michael Jackson held a joint news conference to announce the arrests of a FedEx deliveryman and a second man alleged to be involved in a scheme to smuggle marijuana by shipping packages addressed to unsuspecting recipients, including the one to Trinity. Police refused to release their names.
Yet neither High nor Jackson apologized to Cheye, Trinity and Georgia or declared their absolute innocence.
The mayor of Berwyn Heights and his family "most likely, they were innocent victims" of the drug traffickers' scheme, High said. "But we don't want to draw that definite conclusion at the moment."
High and Jackson defended the raid on the mayor of Berwyn Heights as reasonable and restrained, given the information they had at the time. "In some quarters, this has been viewed as a flawed police operation and an attack on the mayor, which it is not," High said. "This was about an address; this was about a name on a package . . . and, in fact, our people did not know that this was the home of the mayor and his family until after the fact."
The chief and sheriff admitted to what Cheye had already deduced: They did not specifically seek a no-knock warrant before breaking down the mayor's door. Jackson said his deputies were justified in entering the house so forcefully because Georgia screamed when she saw them outside the house, and her cries could have alerted any armed occupants of the home to attack police or destroy evidence.
Deputies were justified in killing Payton and Chase because the dogs had "engaged" them, Jackson said, although he acknowledged under questioning that neither dog had bitten anyone.
Watching accounts of the news conference on television, Cheye grew livid. Not only had the brass refused to apologize or clear them, they were now blaming poor Georgia's terrified scream for the botched raid. They were saying dogs barking at masked men justified slaughter.
Georgia could not be consoled later that night. Was everything her fault because she'd screamed? Trinity held her close. She and Cheye tried to explain that the police were trying to get themselves out of trouble.
If they were ever going to reclaim their lives, Cheye was now certain, they were going to have to make the story of their exoneration bigger than the story of the drug raid on their home. Cheye held a news conference the next morning on their front lawn. As Cheye spoke -- "We have witnessed a frightening law-enforcement culture in which the law is disregarded, the rights of innocent occupants are ignored and the rights of innocent animals mean nothing." -- Trinity began to sob at his side.
By the next morning, the story of the nice attractive young mayor and his photogenic family who were terrorized by police was traveling the globe. Cheye turned on the radio at 5 a.m. to find the BBC leading off the world news with his story. As Cheye fielded interview requests from Paris, sympathy cards, letters and flowers arrived from all over.
Cheye opened the door one day to find a DHL deliveryman holding a box. Cheye froze.
"I'm going to need you to open the box," Cheye recalled telling the shocked deliveryman. "This may seem silly to you, and I'm not going to go into details, but I'm going to need you to open the box."
The deliveryman opened the box so Cheye could peer at the contents: a spray of roses.
***
Cheye and Trinity arranged for the frozen corpses of Payton and Chase to be transferred to a University of Maryland laboratory for animal autopsies. They were examined Aug. 11, and the veterinarian later issued a report consistent with Georgia's account and the physical evidence inside the family home: Payton had been shot four times, twice in the chest/flank region, once in the jaw and once in the neck. Chase was shot twice: once in his rear left legs, once in the chest. The shot to Chase's legs had been fired from behind. After the shot to his chest, he bled to death.
If angry dog lovers around the world puzzled over why police had behaved as they did, Cheye thought he was beginning to understand. Someone mailed Cheye a copy of a 2006 Cato Institute report, "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America." Trinity found the cover photo of a SWAT officer wielding an automatic assault rifle so unsettling that she asked Cheye not to leave it around the house. So, he made his way through the report as he rode the Metro to and from his office in the District. The report's author, a civil liberties advocate named Radley Balko, offered a context for the raid.
Americans have defended their right to privacy and the sanctity of their homes since Revolutionaries denounced British soldiers entering homes and businesses with impunity to search for contraband rum and tea and generate taxes for the British Crown. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits unreasonable government searches and seizures. But civil libertarians argue that this constitutional protection has been seriously eroded in recent decades, largely as an unintended consequence of the nation's war on drugs.
In Balko's summary, paramilitary police units called Special Weapons Attack Teams, or SWATS, grew out of the social unrest of the 1960s. They were used to quell protesting migrant farm workers led by Cesar Chavez, then against urban rioters and in a shootout with the Black Panthers in Los Angeles. Balko writes: "Until the 1980s, SWAT teams and other paramilitary units were used sparingly, only in volatile, high-risk situations such as bank robberies or hostage situations. Likewise, 'no-knock' raids were generally used only in situations where innocent lives were determined to be at imminent risk. America's War on Drugs has spurred a significant rise in the numbers of such raids, to the point where in some jurisdictions drug warrants are only served by SWAT teams or similar paramilitary units, and the overwhelming numbers of SWAT deployments are to execute drug warrants."
Federal policies and funding stemming from the war on drugs gave local police financial incentives for making a high volume of drug arrests, even if they netted only users and low-level dealers, not drug kingpins, and spurred the military to arm SWAT teams with its excess military equipment. Laws allowing police to seize -- and add to their own budgets -- cars, cash, jewels and other items gathered during drug raids, even if nobody was convicted of any crime as a result of their search and seizures, became further incentive for police to use military-style raids against suspected drug traffickers, Balko argues. In a landmark 1995 case, Wilson v. Arkansas, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the longstanding common-law endorsement of the knock-and-announce approach to serving search warrants was enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. But it also recognized significant exceptions to the knock-and-announce approach. In a unanimous opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that police could enter a home unannounced under "exigent circumstances." Among them: if police had a reasonable belief that their safety would be imperiled by announcing themselves, if they were pursuing a fleeing suspect or if an announcement would allow suspects to destroy evidence. In the Berwyn Heights raid, police appeared to suggest that Georgia's terrified scream created the kind of exigent circumstance envisioned by the court.
Last year, Prince George's police deployed SWAT teams to serve search warrants more than 400 times, a police spokesman said. The department's narcotics unit now deploys its SWAT team to serve the overwhelming majority of its search warrants, Maj. Andy Ellis said. The Prince George's Police budget shows that the county expects to spend at least $2.5 million this year reaped from assets seized in drug raids.
Ellis, like police nationwide, defends the burgeoning use of paramilitary-style units to serve routine search warrants, arguing that the increase of force has been necessary to counteract more violent, and better armed, drug dealers. Prince George's SWAT officers recovered 241 firearms while serving search warrants last year, Ellis said. "Conducting narcotics is very dangerous work," Ellis said. "The officers who conduct narcotics search warrants never know what's on the other side of the door."
Civil libertarians argue that military-style raids escalate the level of violence in what could be routine police action, and are leaving a growing number of innocents terrorized, wounded or dead. "Botched raids are a staple of law enforcement," said Graham Boyd, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Drug Law Reform Project. "There is a never-ending stream of ruined homes, ruined lives and innocent people who are killed or terrorized." The Cato Institute Web site features an interactive map tracking hundreds of botched paramilitary police raids nationwide beginning in the late 1990s, including dozens of instances in which innocent people were killed.
Many victims of botched or abusive drug raids are poor minorities whom the public is unlikely to hear about or rally around, Boyd said. Legal immunity granted to police makes it difficult for victims to successfully sue for compensation, he said.
Cheye's reading and research on botched drug raids left him chilled. "This wasn't just about me and Trinity and Georgia anymore," Cheye said. "It was about my community."
Cheye decided that he would push the Maryland state legislature to require police to track, report and curtail the indiscriminate use of SWAT teams to force entry into people's homes unannounced to serve routine search warrants.
***
On a Saturday morning in mid-August, Cheye, Trinity and Georgia parked in a lot outside a pet store in Northern Virginia. They walked down a line of excited Labs available for adoption from a rescue organization, stroking noses, offering treats and asking the handlers about temperaments. Then they spotted a small black Lab who seemed calmer than the others, and they knew their search was over. He looked like Chase. Cheye went inside the pet store to try to buy the newest member of their family, Marshall, a leash and a toy. The woman behind the counter recognized him from the TV news and wouldn't let him pay.
"Marshall doesn't make us miss the boys less, but he steps into a void," Cheye later said. "I think we would have gone crazy if we didn't adopt him."
When the first chills of October came, Trinity lifted a jacket that had hung unused for months on a coat rack by the back door. One sleeve was spattered with blood. Another night, Trinity awakened to get some cold medicine and heard her mother having a nightmare. "Oh, no," Trinity heard Georgia murmuring. "Oh, no. Oh, no."
Georgia had suffered the worst violence during the raid. She was having the toughest time recovering. Outside by a garden bench, a flower pot stood testament to Georgia's state of mind. It was filled to overflowing with the butts of the cigarettes she had smoked.
She kept replaying in her mind the police claim that her terrified scream was their justification for breaking down the front door. She kept replaying the first awful seconds and wondering what she could have done to save Chase and Payton. Trinity and Cheye told her over and over that there was nothing she could have done, but consolation eluded her.
In that strange way that every loss in life evokes every other loss, the helplessness and self-blame Georgia felt the night she had lost her husband 16 years ago haunted her now. Bradley Porter, 37, was a helicopter pilot caught in heavy fog outside Price, Utah. He radioed the airport for someone to telephone Georgia to drive out and pick him up along with his passenger. By the time Georgia reached the distant field, Bradley had a new plan. He wanted Georgia to shine her headlights on power lines that ran parallel to the road. If he safely cleared those lines, he told her, he could follow the road to fly the helicopter in rather than leave it overnight where vandals might damage it. Georgia urged him to leave the helicopter until morning, but he insisted. So Georgia did as he asked. She maneuvered her car to light up the power lines, then watched as the helicopter lifted slightly. Investigators would later determine that one of the helicopter skids struck a knoll on the uneven, snow-covered field. Georgia watched helplessly as the helicopter flipped, crashed and exploded in flames, killing her husband and his passenger.
"I couldn't get to him," Georgia said. "For the longest time, I thought I should have tried harder to talk him out of trying to follow the road that night. It was just that terrible feeling. I could have done so many things differently."
Determined to recover for her children's sake, Georgia enrolled in college in Colorado, hoping to get her degree and become a veterinarian. But the science courses defeated her, and dissecting dead animals in the lab broke her heart. "I was sick of dead animals."
The lagging economy in Utah left Georgia with so few job prospects that she came to live with Cheye and Trinity to begin again. She thought she was finally making her way, and then the front door shattered.
Trinity took most of November off from work to reclaim the house. She cleaned every surface and reorganized every corner the raid had disturbed. She not only was no longer interested in moving; she was changing jobs so she could work from home. They were going to do what it took to be happy there again. "We love our life," Cheye said. "We love our marriage. We love our home. We are determined not to let it slip away."
They were also determined to hold the police accountable. Through a lawyer, Cheye, Trinity and Georgia have filed a notice of intent to sue the Prince George's County Police Department and the Sheriff's Office.
By the time, Cheye and Trinity hung ornaments on the Christmas tree in December, their sunny little brick home seemed almost as cozy as it used to, but different. Some damage couldn't be repaired. Georgia couldn't live in the house any longer and moved to an apartment in the area. Payton and Chase's ashes rested in a wooden chest, topped by their framed photo.
Cheye likes to sit near the chest on winter nights, Marshall at his feet, as he reads. Often, he sits up late researching Supreme Court rulings on police searches and seizures.
He's read the court's decision in one 2006 case, Hudson v. Michigan, more than once. In Hudson, the court found that even when police make a clearly illegal no-knock raid, the evidence they seize can still be used against a defendant at trial.
"In other words, police can do what they did to us with impunity" Cheye concluded. "There are no consequences, not for them."
April Witt is a staff writer for the Magazine. She can be reached at witta@washpost.com.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/23/AR2009012302935.html?hpid=topnews
Former Lafayette police officer gets probation
3:34 PM EST, January 12, 2009
A former Lafayette College police officer arrested for fondling two office employees on campus will serve 18 months of probation, but no jail time.
Barry Stauffer, 59, of 145 Brentwood Ave., Palmer Township, pleaded guilty today to two misdemeanor counts of stalking. Beyond the probation, he must also perform 50 hours of community service.
Stauffer, a 22-year employee of Lafayette who earlier worked as a Palmer officer, left the university just before the two women went to police with their allegations in late 2007. Both the women worked as dispatchers and office assistants and charged he regularly grabbed or attempted to grab their breasts at the public safety office in Marquis Hall over an eight-month period that ended in August 2007.
One of the women said Stauffer would also snap her bra strap, and once tried to kiss her. The other said he also once fondled her while driving her to the college's health center when she didn't feel well.
Under the guilty plea, prosecutors agreed to drop two misdemeanor charges of indecent assault. Stauffer's defense attorney submitted to the court an evaluation by a psychologist who said Stauffer is a good candidate for community supervision.
Northampton County Judge Stephen Baratta ordered Stauffer to have no contact with the women, and to remain off the Lafayette campus.
-- Reporting by Riley Yates, The Morning Call
http://www.mcall.com/news/local/all-stauffer0112-cn,0,2507599.story
Detention officer arrested for molesting his teen relative
More Phoenix Local News
07:50 PM Mountain Standard Time on Monday, January 12, 2009
Maricopa County Sheriff's Office
PHOENIX - The following is a press release from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office:
Maricopa County Sheriff’s Detention Officer Robert Ramirez was arrested and charged Monday by the Phoenix Police Department for sexual conduct with a minor.
Ramirez’s 15-year-old family member reportedly admitted to another relative, who is also a detention officer, that she was molested by the suspect when she was approximately ten years old. The information was passed along to the Phoenix Police Department who say that Ramirez admitted to the charge after submitting to and failing a polygraph examination.
Ramirez worked for the Sheriff’s Office as a detention officer since November of 2005 and was assigned to the Lower Buckeye Jail. Subsequent to his arrest the officer has been placed on administrative leave pending further determination of his employment.
http://www.azfamily.com/news/local/stories/phoenix-local-news-011209-detention-officer-arrest.bd99f9.html
Ex-wife stands behind police officer arrested for assault, robbery
By Gerry Bellett, Vancouver Sun
METRO VANCOUVER - The ex-wife of one of the three police officers arrested by Vancouver police following a fight with a newspaper delivery driver says her former husband has told her not to believe media accounts of what is alleged to have happened.
“I know all these guys. They are not the way they are being portrayed in the media right now,” said Sheri Klassen, who lives in Kelowna.
Const. Jeffrey Klassen was suspended with pay by New Westminster Police Chief Lorne Zapotichny on Thursday after he and two police officer friends — one employed in Delta, the other in West Vancouver — were arrested on suspicion of assault and robbery during an incident early Wednesday outside the Hyatt Regency Hotel.
Zapotichny announced the suspension of the 38-year-old constable, who has been on the force for four years.
“The suspension arises from a Vancouver police department criminal investigation into allegations of assault and robbery during the member’s off-duty activities,” said a news release issued by Zapotichny.
Zapotichny said the suspension would be reviewed within 30 days by the New Westminster police board.
But Sheri said she was upset with the way the three police officers were being described.
She said they were all close friends who graduated together from the Justice Institute of B.C.
They were together Tuesday night having a reunion in the downtown entertainment district, she said.
“As far as I know they were walking back to their cars after the clubs closed when they met this person on the street. I know these guys, when they drink they’re not obnoxious and they’re not bullies. I have no idea what the confrontation was about but my ex-husband is trained in the use of force to a higher degree than most other police officers and if anyone was to get irate he’d step in and calm them down,” she said.
Sheri said she had received a couple of e-mails from her former husband apologizing for what happened. She had been expecting him to visit her and their children that night.
The couple have been divorced for less than a month, she said.
“I got an e-mail from him last night [Wednesday] saying: “I’m okay, everything will be all right no matter how bad it sounds, I promise. My phone’s been seized.”
She received another e-mail Thursday saying: “I wish I could tell you what happened. It’s not like it’s been reported in the media.”
“I know robbery didn’t happen,” Sheri said. “I’m not saying this because I’m his ex-wife. I know these police officers and they are good guys.”
Meanwhile the alleged victim, a 47-year-old Surrey man who is a driver with Dolphin Delivery, is off work recovering from his injuries.
Dolphin manager Dave Breen said the driver has been told by police not to speak with the media.
“All I can say is he’s been to the doctor. He’s banged up pretty badly and I think he’ll be off work for a little while,” said Breen.
The driver has worked for the company for 12 years delivering early morning newspapers to the downtown area.
The Hyatt was one of his stops and the confrontation with the three off-duty police officers occurred as he was making his way into the hotel, said Breen.
Breen wouldn’t say what he believes happened to the driver but acknowledged media reports that a city works crew intervened in the fight. “As well as staff from the hotel,” he said.
Vancouver police official Jana McGuinness refused to confirm any of the media accounts of the driver having his wallet and cellphone stolen by the trio.
“We will not be releasing any of the background information relating to the incident which is still under investigation,” she said.
The officers were released without being charged later Wednesday after being arrested by Vancouver police who answered a 911 call, she said.
All three forces have launched Police Act investigations into the conduct of their arrested officers and have taken the matter to the Police Complaints Commissioner’s office.
Delta police official Sharlene Brooks said Thursday that Police Chief Jim Cessford was still considering his options about what to do with the arrested 28-year-old officer who has been on the force for three years.
She said New Westminster Police might have received more information on the alleged offences than Delta has been given, leading them to suspend their officer.
“At this point Chief Cessford has options available but he’s waiting for more information before acting,” she said.
West Vancouver police have reassigned their officer who was arrested to desk duties, said department spokesman Cpl. Fred Harding. The officer had only been with the department for 18 months.
“The reassignment comes after careful consideration and takes effect immediately,” said Harding.
gbellett@vancouversun.com
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
http://www.winknews.com/news/local/38246899.html
Former police officer arrested for flashing badge
January 24th, 2009 @ 12:28pm
ST. GEORGE, Utah (AP) -- A former police officer who showed his old badge for leniency at traffic stops has been charged with trying to impersonate an officer.
Utah Highway Patrol officers say Maxwell Tyler Houghton pulled out the badge twice at different stops by troopers on the same day. Shortly after the second time they learned he was a former officer who left the St. George Police Department nearly two years ago.
Troopers caught up with Houghton and arrested him.
UHP Sgt. Dan Ferguson says it's illegal for anyone who isn't a police officer to possess a badge.
Houghton, 27, was jailed Monday on $1,331 bail on charges of speeding and two counts of impersonating a police officer.
Online jail records at Purgatory Correctional Facility show he was released Friday.
------
Information from: The Spectrum
(Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=5408642
Gambia's top intelligence officer arrested for being FBI agent
Banjul, Gambia - A senior officer of the Gambia National Intelligence Age ncy, Yankunba Badjie, has been arrested over suspicion of being an American FBI agent.
Badjie is currently being detained at the Gambia Police headquarter in Banjul, where he is helping the police in their investigations, authoritative sources confirmed to PANA Tuesday.
According to sources, Badjie was arrested for sending e-mails to the FBI in the US and some of the e-mail messages were found on his computer in his office at the NIA office in Banjul.
Sources said Badjie was the right hand man of President Yahya Jammeh at the NIA office, reporting directly to the president, adding that his arrest came as a surprise to many at the NIA.
Gambia Police Public Relations Officer Assistant Superintendent Sulayman Secka confirmed the arrest and detention of Mr. Badjie, noting that investigations into the matter were ongoing, while the security intelligences had set-up a panel to a lso look into the matter.
Banjul - 06/01/2009
http://www.afriquejet.com/news/africa-news/gambia%27s-top-intelligence-officer-arrested-for-being-fbi-agent-2009010718937.html
VSP Officer Arrested for forcible Sodomy
CHESTER, Va. (AP)
Posted: 7:00 AM Jan 27, 2009
Last Updated: 1:34 PM Jan 28, 2009
A veteran Virginia State Police officer is under arrest and charged with a felony count of forcible sodomy.
The arrest Monday of Capt. Edward L. Hope Jr. followed an investigation by the State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the Chesterfield County Commonwealth's Attorney's Office.
According to the state police, the 52-year-old law enforcement officer joined the state police in 1979. His most current assignment was as division commander of the Information Technology Division at state police headquarters in Richmond. He has been placed on administrative leave.
Hope was arrested in Chesterfield County and has a court appearance scheduled for Tuesday. He has not retained an attorney.
http://www.whsv.com/virginiaap/headlines/38379499.html
New Orleans police officer arrested for DWI on the Causeway
Posted by Christine Harvey, St. Tammany bureau January 09, 2009 3:48PM
Categories: News Impact Page
An off-duty New Orleans police officer was arrested this week and charged with driving while intoxicated on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway.
James Crespo III, 52, was headed northbound Monday around 2:30 a.m. when a Causeway police officer spotted him speeding on the bridge a few miles from the north shore, said Causeway Police Chief Nick Congemi.
The officer, who was using radar equipment, pulled Crespo over at the north toll plaza in Mandeville, Congemi said.
He asked for Crespo's information and that he step out of his vehicle, he said. It is unclear whether Crespo, who lives in New Orleans, was driving an unmarked squad car or his own personal vehicle.
Crespo, an administrative sergeant who has been with the NOPD since 1978, appeared unsteady as he walked to the rear of his vehicle, then upon reaching the rear of the vehicle, leaned against the rear for balance, Congemi said.
He removed his wallet, which contained his New Orleans police commission, and handed the officer his driver's license, he said. However, Crespo refused the officer's request that he submit to a field sobriety test, Congemi said.
The officer asked whether Crespo was carrying a weapon, and Crespo said that he had a gun and that it was in the vehicle, he said.
He then retrieved Crespo's gun, which apparently was his personal weapon, as opposed to his service revolver, Congemi said.
The officer then handcuffed Crespo and arrested him before taking him to Louisiana State Police Troop L, he said. Crespo refused to take a breathalyzer test at Troop L.
In addition to DWI, Crespo is charged with driving 77 mph in a 65-mph zone, Congemi said.
Crespo's age and address were not immediately available from Causeway police.
Congemi said he expects the charges to be filed Monday with the St. Tammany Parish district attorney's office.
http://blog.nola.com/tpnorthshore/2009/01/new_orleans_police_officer_arr.html
Former Rigby Police officer arrested for DUI
By Steven Pope
Video
ST. ANTHONY - Twenty-two year-old Jacob Fullmer was arrested by St. Anthony City Police this past Sunday.
He allegedly had an alcohol content over the legal driving limit. The citation shows he was driving at the intersection of First North and Bridge Street at approximately 1:30am. He was seen entering an alley marked "Do Not Enter."
The arresting officer reports Fullmer admitted drinking a couple of beers.
Fullmer was taken to the Fremont County jail and has since posted a 500-dollar bail.
He was not "on duty" at the time of the arrest and is no longer employed by the Rigby Police Department.
http://www.kidk.com/news/local/37375224.html
Murray police officer arrested for sexual assault
January 12th, 2009 @ 9:02pm
(KSL News) Allegations of sexual assault have prompted the resignation and arrest of Murray police officer Michael Spilman.
A complaint led West Valley City police to book Spilman for aggravated sexual assault and forcible sexual abuse.
Spilman, a 10-year veteran of Murray's police force, is sitting in the Davis County Jail for his own protection. Police fear possible reprisals from Salt Lake County Jail inmates recently arrested by Spilman.
Police say they're releasing very little information about the case to protect the victim.
http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=5302233
Myrtle Beach Police officer arrested for DUI
By Graeme Moore
Monday, January 12, 2009 at 11:11 p.m.
A Myrtle Beach Police officer is no longer on the force after being pulled on suspicion of drinking and driving.
James Post, 38, of Myrtle Beach resigned and now faces a driving under the influence charge.
Highway Patrol says just after midnight on Friday, a trooper spotted Post weaving in and out of traffic on River Oaks Drive in Myrtle Beach.
The trooper did a field sobriety test and then arrested Post, and took him to jail.
He was released Saturday morning.
http://www.carolinalive.com/news/news_story.aspx?id=245813
CMPD officer arrested for DWI charge
By: News 14 Carolina Web Staff
Karen Dula
CHARLOTTE -- A Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer was arrested early Sunday morning for DWI.
Officer Karen Dula was stopped by a highway patrol trooper near 7th Street and McDowell Street in uptown Charlotte. She was subsequently arrested for DWI and transported to the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office.
"It is unfortunate that a member of the CMPD has been arrested for driving while impaired but we will continue to hold our officers responsible for their actions on and off-duty,” said CMPD Chief Rodney Monroe in a statement.
Dula has been placed on administrative duties pending an internal investigation. She’s been with CMPd since Sept. 22, 2003.
http://news14.com/content/local_news/charlotte/603458/cmpd-officer-arrested-for-dwi-charge/Default.aspx
IMPD officer arrested for misconduct with prostitute
WTHR-TV
updated 6:13 p.m. ET, Tues., Jan. 13, 2009
Indianapolis - A Metro police officer is accused of paying a prostitute for sex while in uniform.
Officer James Ingalls is facing one count of D felony official misconduct and one count of A misdemeanor patronizing a prostitute. Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi filed the charges Tuesday.
According to the probable cause affidavit, Ingalls approached Kristen Harbaugh about performing sex for money on several occasions. He was in full uniform and driving a department-issued vehicle at the time.
The probable cause affidavit says that Ingalls took Harbaugh to Garden City Elementary School where the transaction took place. The document goes on to say that Ingalls is a part-time employee at the Metropolitan School District of Wayne Township, and he had the alarm codes and keys to enter the building.
Ingalls also would inform Harbaugh to stay off the streets when IMPD conducted prostitution sweeps in that neighborhood, according to the probable cause affidavit.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28642325/
Bent Cnty. Officer Arrested for Attempted Sex Crimes On Children Save Email Print
Posted: 10:39 AM Jan 26, 2009
Last Updated: 10:39 AM Jan 26, 2009
Reporter: KKTV
Jefferson County Sheriff's Office arrested a Bent County law enforcement officer
The Jefferson County Sheriff's Office says they arrested Hubert E. Teague, 35, of La Junta on January 23. Teague is being charged with Attempted Internet Sex-Exploitation of Child and Attempted Sexual Exploitation of a Child.
Teague was employed as a detention officer with the Bent County Sheriff’s Office. He has been place on administrative leave without pay pending investigation.
The case is being investigated by the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office and District attorney.
Teague will have his first appearance in court on Monday.
http://www.kktv.com/news/headlines/38331929.html
Muncie Police officer punished for DWI
By RICK YENCER • ryencer@muncie.gannett.com • January 8, 2009
MUNCIE -- A veteran Muncie police officer arrested for drunken driving last month has been suspended for 10 days without pay and will enter a diversion program to avoid prosecution.
Bradley O. Wiemer, 39, a police detective, began serving the suspension without pay on Monday, according to Police Chief Deborah Davis, adding that time off was the standard discipline for such an offense.
Wiemer was initially stopped for speeding at 1:38 a.m. Dec. 7 on Kilgore Avenue, west of Tillotson Avenue, by an Indiana State Police trooper who noticed Wiemer smelled of alcohol and had bloodshot and glassy eyes.
After initially refusing to take a field sobriety test, a legal blood draw was taken at Ball Memorial Hospital, where Wiemer's blood-alcohol content was measured at 0.223 percent. In Indiana, motorists with a BAC of 0.08 percent or higher are considered intoxicated.
Wiemer told the trooper he had about nine drinks at the Fraternal Order of Police Christmas party that night as he displayed his police identification with his driver's license, according to a supplemental police report.
"Why are you doing this?" Wiemer repeatedly asked the trooper as he apparently became upset, saying he had been an officer for 14 years.
After refusing the field test, Wiemer was taken for a legal blood draw that had to be done twice after another city police officer initially refused to witness the procedure, according to the ISP report.
The prosecutor's office filed a formal charge of operating driving while intoxicated, a Class C misdemeanor, against Wiemer on Dec. 15 in Muncie City Court.
Three days later, a hearing was held that saw Wiemer's attorney, James Schafer, offer a petition to defer prosecution with Wiemer entering a diversion program for first-time offenders. Then-City Court Judge Linda Ralu Wolf, now Delaware Circuit Court 3 judge, signed off on the agreement.
The diversion program is available to first-time drunken drivers who have a clean record, according to Delaware County Prosecutor Mark McKinney, with the charge being dismissed after one year if the offender had met all terms of the agreement.
Wiemer agreed to not to commit any other crimes, to undergo alcohol and drug evaluation and complete treatment, and to perform 40 hours of community service, according to the agreement, which also called for a license restriction for 180 days, allowing him to work.
Contact news reporter Rick Yencer at 213-5833.
http://www.thestarpress.com/article/20090108/NEWS01/901080400
Former Police Officer Arrested for Not Paying Child Support
by: BVI Platinum News
Fri, January 09, 2009 | 12:06 pm AST
A former Police officer was the latest father to be arrested for not paying child support; as ordered by the court.
On January 8, 2009 at 12:30 p.m. the defendant walked into the Road Town Police Station to conduct business in the Administration Office, when he was spotted by the Senior Court Officer.
A default warrant of $2,717.50 is in existence for the arrest and imprisonment of the defendant for not paying child support to the mother of his child as maintenance. The defendant had not paid for a period of over six (6) months.
He had informed local court marshals that he would have paid the money in December, 2008, but he did not pay as promised.
If the defendant does not pay the sum of $2,717.50 by 3p.m. on 8th January, 2009, he will be transported to Her Majesty’s Prison where he will be detained for six (6) months until the monies are paid.
If the monies are not paid after six (6) months period, he will spend a further six (6) months in prison.
http://www.bviplatinum.com/news.php?section=article&source=1231438608
Officer arrested for DUI
WBBH-TV
updated 10:12 a.m. ET, Sun., Jan. 25, 2009
FORT MYERS: A Fort Myers officer has been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of a criminal investigation.
According to reports Officer Leon Young, 40, tried to avoid a DUI checkpoint by entering a parking lot early Saturday morning.
When deputies approached his car they noticed he was intoxicated and saw a marijuana like substance on the front of his shirt.
Canine units conducted a free air search of the car and gained a positive alert but no drugs were found.
Young was refusing to do a field sobriety test and just asked to be taken to jail.
When Young was asked to take a breathalyzer he screamed at the officer and said "You are apart of the KKK and so is your father."
"I am extremely disappointed. This is not the conduct that we would expect from one of our officers," said Chief Doug Baker.
After a series of field sobriety exercises Young was arrested and has been placed on administrative leave.
Deputies say they arrested a total of 11 people for driving under the influence and issued 29 tickets Friday night.
Almost 600 cars passed through the checkpoint.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28828746/
Corrections officer arrested for burglary
WBBH-TV
updated 5:13 p.m. ET, Mon., Jan. 26, 2009
FORT MYERS: A Lee County Corrections Officer was arrested on burglary charges.
On Sunday morning Fort Myers police went to O'Brien Auto Mall about a reported burglary in progress.
Officers saw two men inside the car lot's fenced area. When being questioned the men denied any wrongdoing.
Officers searched the area and found a round nylon bag containing 18 lug nuts.
The officers discovered the two suspects entered the compound with burglary tools and had removed the lug nuts from a 2008 blue Subaru Impreza.
Reports say 23-year-old Lee County Sheriff's Office Corrections Officer William J. Edwards was a suspect.
"While disappointing to say the least the events of this weekend involving a Fort Myers police officer and a Lee County corrections officer being arrested proves the resolve of local law enforcement that nobody is above the law," said Sheriff Mike Scott.
The other suspect’s name was not released,but both were arrested and charged with burglary of a structure, possession of burglary tools with intent to use, and petty theft.
Edwards was immediately placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of an Internal Affairs Investigation.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28843539/
Former police officer arrested for growing pot
Brooke Meier
January 28, 2009 - A retired Detroit police officer was arrested at his Waterford Township home last week after federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) personnel executed a search warrant at the home and discovered drugs.
According to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Detroit, DEA personnel executed a federal search warrant on Thursday, Jan. 22 at Walter Fournier's residence in the 3000 block of Megan Street.
Fournier was home at the time of the search.
The DEA reportedly found a dedicated indoor marijuana grow room in the basement of Fournier's home. According to the federal court documents, the basement contained 157 marijuana plants, two paper grocery bags containing approximately three pounds of marijuana, a heat sealer, packaging and pre-packaged marijuana in a heat-sealed bag.
A loaded revolver was also found inside a nightstand in the home's master bedroom. The court documents didn't indicate whether the gun was registered.
DEA Information Officer Rich Isaacson said he couldn't comment on the case because it's still under investigation.
Fournier, who retired from the Detroit Police Department in 1974, has been charged with possession of marijuana with intent to distribute. He was released on a $10,000 bond and appointed a public defender. The attorney's name hasn't been released.
While free on bond, Fournier will have to participate in random testing for prohibited substances, participate in abuse therapy and counseling, and refrain from possessing a firearm, a destructive device, or other dangerous weapons.
Fournier will appear in court again on Wednesday, Feb. 11 for a preliminary examination.
http://www.spinalcolumnonline.com/Articles-i-2009-01-28-68562.113117_Former_police_officer_arrested_for_growing_pot.html
Judge chastises federal attorney
Says prosecutor failed to disclose crucial evidence
By Jonathan Saltzman
Globe Staff / January 27, 2009
The chief judge of the US District Court in Massachusetts is threatening to sanction a federal prosecutor for what he characterized as the latest "egregious failure" of the US attorney's office to disclose evidence that could have helped clear a defendant.
Chief District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf said in a sharply worded memorandum that Assistant US Attorney Suzanne Sullivan failed to disclose that a Boston police officer's testimony at a pretrial hearing contradicted what the officer had repeatedly told the prosecutor beforehand. The defendant, a Mattapan man arrested on gun charges in July 2007, is awaiting trial.
Wolf said the truth about the circumstances of the arrest came to light only when he reviewed Sullivan's notes of her interviews of the police officer, Rance Cooley. The judge wants Sullivan and her boss, US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan, who are not related, to file affidavits by Feb. 5 explaining why he should not sanction her, the US attorney's office, or both.
"The egregious failure of the government to disclose plainly material exculpatory evidence in this case extends a dismal history of intentional and inadvertent violations of the government's duties to disclose in cases assigned to this court," Wolf, a high-ranking prosecutor in the office in the 1980s, wrote in his 42-page rul ing.
He listed at least nine major cases he presided over during the last two decades in which prosecutors working for Michael Sullivan and his predecessors allegedly withheld important evidence. In several instances, the jurist, 62, wrote, the misconduct led to mistrials and convictions that were overturned.
In an extraordinary rebuke of the office in July 2007, Wolf asked the Bar Counsel of the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers to launch disciplinary proceedings against a veteran federal prosecutor, Jeffrey Auerhahn, who allegedly withheld key evidence in a New England Mafia case from the early 1990s. That matter is pending, according to the Bar Counsel.
Wolf said in Wednesday's ruling that his only successful sanction occurred in 2002, when he ordered an inexperienced prosecutor to attend a seminar on wrongful convictions after the lawyer repeatedly withheld critical evidence.
Yesterday, Michael Sullivan said in a statement that Suzanne Sullivan was a "valued member" of the office but that "we, of course, take seriously the issues raised by the court." He said he was reviewing the matter and would file a response.
Michael Sullivan, a President Bush appointee who has served as the top federal law enforcement official in Massachusetts since a week after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, is widely expected to be replaced by the Obama administration in the coming months.
John F. Palmer, the court-appointed lawyer for the defendant, Darwin E. Jones, 30, in the gun case, said he was disappointed Wolf found that the arrest still passed constitutional muster despite the alleged misconduct by the government. But Wolf's threat of sanctions illustrated that the judge will not tolerate the withholding of evidence, he said. "Judge Wolf is known to take exculpatory evidence issues very seriously, and, as he recounts in the decision, it's not the first time that it's happened," the Boston lawyer said. "And he wants to send a broader message. That's what I take from the decision. It is a big deal."
Wolf's ruling came in a relatively routine gun arrest by members of the Youth Violence Task Force, a joint effort by Boston police and the State Police. Around 11 p.m. on July 3, 2007, Cooley and other members of the unit went to Middleton Street in Dorchester in response to a complaint about a group of youths smoking marijuana and playing loud music.
Cooley testified at a pivotal pretrial hearing in October that he saw a man on a bicycle at the scene and made eye contact with him, and that the man then turned and rode away, according to Wolf's ruling. Cooley said this was suspicious because he recognized the bicyclist as Jones and had never known Jones to avoid him. After Jones allegedly rode away, other officers pursued him down a dead-end street, but he did not stop, the ruling said. He got off the bike and ran down an alley to another street, ignoring orders to halt. Officers on foot finally tackled him and found a gun in his pocket, authorities said.
However, the report that Cooley wrote immediately after the arrest said nothing about him recognizing Jones on the bicycle, according to Wolf's ruling. Rather, it says that Jones was identified later, after the officers tackled him.
Cooley repeatedly told the prosecutor in the case, Suzanne Sullivan, the same thing in the months after the arrest, Wolf wrote. Nonetheless, after Jones's lawyer challenged the arrest, the prosecutor filed an affidavit by Cooley saying he recognized Jones on the bike and found his behavior suspicious.
The truth, Wolf said, only came out during the pretrial hearing after he reviewed Sullivan's notes of her interviews with Cooley. She also took the witness stand at the hearing, during which Palmer questioned her and then Wolf did.
"The court assumes that her failure to disclose material, exculpatory information was not intentional, in part because Sullivan produced her notes for the court's in camera inspection," Wolf wrote. "Nevertheless, the violations were clear and inexcusable. If the error by an experienced prosecutor was inadvertent, it seems only to be explained by ignorance of, or utter indifference to, the constitutional duty she repeatedly claimed to have understood and obeyed."
Suzanne Sullivan was a prosecutor in the Plymouth district attorney's office, which Michael Sullivan once headed, before she became a federal prosecutor.
Wolf ultimately ruled that the police had the right to arrest Jones because he allegedly fled when officers began pursuing him in a cruiser and on foot. A convicted felon, Jones faces a sentence of 15 years to life in prison if he is found guilty of gun possession, Palmer said.
Citing court precedents, the judge mentioned several possible sanctions against Suzanne Sullivan ranging from a fine to an order to attend an ethics seminar.
Wolf wrote that it is up to the US attorney's office to decide whether to prosecute any officer who testified falsely in the Jones case. Elaine Driscoll, a Boston police spokeswoman, said department lawyers were reviewing the matter to determine what action, if any, to take.
She said Cooley is a "highly respected member of the Boston Police Department and has done tremendous work out on the streets
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/01/27/judge_chastises_federal_attorney/
3 off-duty police officers beat man while he cried for help: witness
Thu Jan 22, 11:11 PM
Three off-duty police officers who are alleged to have assaulted and robbed a man early Wednesday in downtown Vancouver kicked and punched him while he repeatedly pleaded for help, a taxi driver who witnessed the ordeal said Thursday.
Yash, a cabbie with Vancouver Cab who drove two of the officers to the scene, said he saw the man's lips bleeding and he seemed to be badly hurt.
The cab driver's statements provide the first dramatic account of an incident that occurred about 2:30 a.m. Wednesday in the 600 block of Burrard Street.
Yash, who asked to be identified only by his first name, said he picked up two of the officers from a pub on Granville Street and took them to a location near the Hyatt Regency Vancouver hotel on Burrard, where a fight was already underway between two people.
"They jumped out of the taxi, [leaving] the door open. Then they started beating the same guy," Yash told CBC News on Thursday.
"Three people were beating one guy, and the guy was crying very loudly, 'Please help me. They are going to kill me,' " Yash said.
The three off-duty police officers belong with the West Vancouver, New Westminster and Delta police departments. They were arrested by Vancouver police early Wednesday morning after the altercation.
The man injured in the incident is a newspaper deliverer from Surrey. He was not taken to hospital but was shaken up, Yash said.
Yash said he tried to ask the officers to stop the fight but they did not listen and yelled at him.
He then called 911 and Vancouver police arrived shortly and later arrested the three men, who had not said they were police officers, Yash said.
The officers' names have not been released and no charges have been laid. Police continued to investigate the incident on Thursday.
The 38-year-old officer with New Westminster Police Service joined the force four years ago and has been suspended with pay for at least 30 days.
The member of the West Vancouver Police Department, a junior officer, has been reassigned, West Vancouver police spokesman Cpl. Fred Harding said.
"At 12 o'clock today the officer was reassigned to desk duty and that takes place effective immediately, so he's assigned to a desk as soon as he is back on duty," Harding said Thursday.
The Delta officer, a patrolman with three years of experience, remained on active duty, Delta police spokeswoman Const. Sharlene Brooks said Wednesday.
Vancouver police are conducting a criminal investigation into the alleged assault. The three police services for which the officers worked will each also conduct an internal review of their actions. All four investigations will be conducted by police and overseen by the B.C. police complaint commissioner, according to deputy commissioner Bruce Brown.
"I know full well that many people believe that police shouldn't investigate [themselves], but that's the way it is," said Brown, referring to the provincial legislation that guides police-conduct investigations.
"Our office has full oversight power over that investigation, so we can order a further investigation, or an external investigation, or can order a public hearing if we're not satisfied of the completeness or the thoroughness of it," he said.
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/cbc/090122/canada/canada_britishcolumbia_bc_three_police_officers_suspension
Second man claims he was abused by BART shooterDavid Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Friday January 16, 2009
Following Tuesday's arrest of former Bay Area Rapid Transit officer Johannes Mehserle for murder in the fatal shooting of a defenseless suspect on New Year's Eve, another man has come forward to allege that Mehserle used excessive force against him on an earlier occasion.
Ken Carrethers told ABC7 News in San Francisco that he was arrested after complaining to another passenger that his car had been broken into twice in the parking lot and the transit police did nothing because "they're standing around with their hands in their pockets."
In interviews with both ABC7 and CNN, Carrethers explained that Mehserle overheard this comment and remarked, "You're talking about us, aren't you?"
Carrethers replied, "How would you know that I'm talking about you from what I said to her?" He says that a second officer then came up and told him, "I think you're drunk."
According to Carrethers, "Mehserle said 'Have you learned not to mess with police?' And I said 'All I know is you beat me up.'"
The police report charges that Carrethers was "using profanities" and making "verbal threats" to attack the officers and resisted violently when the officers tried to subdue him.
Carrethers, however, insists that "I go to church every Sunday, and I don't cuss." He says that Mehserle grabbed him, they fell to the ground, and "before I know it I got five officers on top of me beating the hell out of me." The officers took him to a hospital, where he was described as having injuries to his face and pain in his shoulder.
An ABC7 legal analyst noted that there are a number of peculiar aspects to the officers' version of events. One is that police are trained not to overreact to merely verbal abuse. Another is that Carrethers was charged only with resisting arrest and there was no mention of any other crime for which he was being arrested.
Mehserle's attorney insisted in a statement to CNN, "The allegations are ridiculous and it didn't occur. We question the timing and the motivation."
Carrethers, however, told CNN, "Had someone listened to me at the time when I first began trying to get help, there just might have been a chance that Oscar Grant might still be alive."
He also stated of Mehserle, "He seemed to be the type of person that was arrogant and thought because he had the badge on that he couldn't be touched."
This video is from CNN's Newsroom, broadcast Jan. 15, 2009.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/BART_officer_accused_of_excessive_force_0116.html
FOLLOW-UP: Ex-cop held in Calif. train platform shooting
Unarmed man's death was captured on camera, provoked Oakland protests
OAKLAND, Calif. - A former transit police officer accused of killing an unarmed black man on an Oakland train platform has been arrested on a murder warrant in Nevada, 12 days after the shooting, which sparked violent street protests.
Johannes Mehserle, 27, was taken into custody Tuesday evening under a fugitive warrant issued from California, law enforcement officials said.
Mehserle surrendered without incident, authorities said.
Karen Boyd, a spokeswoman for Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, confirmed the arrest and said the mayor's office had been informed of it earlier Tuesday night. Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff was expected to announce details of the charges on Wednesday.
A message left late Tuesday night at the office of Mehserle's attorney, Christopher Miller, was not immediately returned. But he told the San Francisco Chronicle that Mehserle was arrested on suspicion of murder.
Witnesses say Mehserle fired into the back of 22-year-old Oscar Grant while the man was lying facedown on a train platform at a station in Oakland. Grant and others had been pulled off a train after reports of fighting, as New Year's Eve revelers were shuttling home after midnight.
Dozens of arrests
The shooting was captured on several cell phone cameras and widely viewed on the Internet. Hundreds of protesters have taken to the streets calling for the prosecution of Mehserle, with one rally last Wednesday spiraling into violence and resulting in more than 100 arrests and dozens of businesses damaged.
John Burris, the attorney for Grant's family, said he talked to Grant's mother, Wanda Johnson, on Tuesday night and she was delighted with the news of the arrest.
"However it does not bring her son back," Burris said. "But she is happy and pleased that an arrest has occurred."
Video
Video appears to show subway shooting
Jan. 6: Cell phone video appears to show a shooting in a California subway.
MSNBC
Grant's family has also filed a $25 million legal claim against Bay Area Rapid Transit.
Dereca Blackmon, the co-founder of the Coalition Against Police Execution, which was organizing a protest Wednesday, said she was pleased Mehserle was arrested but still wanted to know more details.
"We're disappointed that it took him fleeing the state in order for the law to take some action," she said. "Honestly this situation brings more questions than answers. Why was he fleeing?"
Douglas County, where the arrest occurred, is 15 miles south of Carson City in northwestern Nevada and includes Lake Tahoe and Carson Valley.
Mehserle refused to talk to BART investigators before resigning his position last week. The transit authority passed on details of its internal investigation to Orloff's office on Monday. The case also is being investigated by the Oakland Police Department.
State Attorney General Jerry Brown has assigned a prosecutor to monitor the case, and the U.S. Department of Justice has dispatched mediators to help avert violent protests such as one in Oakland last week.
BART board member Carole Ward Allen said she was pleased to hear the news about the arrest.
"I want to know why he did it," she said. "We've heard from everybody else but him. While I can't speak for the entire BART board, we want to make this process as transparent as possible."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28650273/
Texas man shot in own driveway by police
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Thursday January 8, 2009
The family of a young black Texas man who was shot in his own driveway by a white police officer believes that racial profiling was the cause and are asking for criminal charges to be filed against the officer.
According to family members, Robbie Tolan and his cousin were returning to Tolan's home in the mostly white Houston suburb of Bellaire in the early hours of December 31, when they were approached by officers who suspected the SUV they had just gotten out of was stolen.
Tolan's parents, who own the SUV, came out of the house to explain the situation. An altercation ensued and Tolan's mother was thrown against the garage door by an officer. According to Tolan's uncle, "Her son was on his back at the time, and he raised up and asked, 'What are you doing to my mom?' and the officer shot him -- while he was on the ground."
The 23 year old Tolan is the son of former Cincinnati Reds outfielder Bobby Tolan, and he himself has played for minor-league teams. Now he lies in a hospital bed with a bullet lodged in his liver, perhaps permanently, his future sports career in question.
Althought the incident occurred a week ago, it is attracting fresh interest amid reports of riots in Oakland, CA over the fatal shooting by a transit officer there of an unarmed black suspect who was lying helpless on the ground.
The Tolans would like to see the officer who shot their son charged with a crime. They have hired a lawyer, who stated, "There's no doubt in my mind that if these had been two white kids, they never would have been shot.”
Bellaire's assistant police chief told reporters, "As far as any allegations of racial profiling, I'd probably say that that's not really going to float." However, there has been no other explanation offered for why the officers might have thought the SUV was stolen.
There is now an internal police department investigation going on and the Harris County district attorney's office is also looking into whether to file charges.
This video is from CNN's American Morning, broadcast Jan. 8, 2009.
Video here:
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Racial_profiling_suspected_in_shooting_of_0108.html
N. Orleans cops shoot man 12 times in the back
Andrew McLemore
Published: Friday January 9, 2009
A young, black man in New Orleans is dead, slain by police officers on New Year's Day, in an incident that has outraged a community and triggered protests over what family members are calling a "murder."
The New Orleans man, 22-year-old Adolph Grimes III, traveled to his grandmother's home near the French Quarter in order to celebrate New Year's Eve with his fiance and their 17-month-old son. Three hours after arrival, around 3 a.m., he was found dead a block from the front door.
The Orleans Parish coroner said Grimes was shot 14 times, including 12 times in the back.
"This violence has to stop. My child's death will not be meaningless. He did not die in vain," said Grimes' mother, Patricia Grimes.
An editorial in The Times-Picayune said the shooting "demands answers."
Despite the fact that the seven officers involved in the incident have been reassigned, Superintendent Warren Riley has refused to answer "fundamental questions" about the shooting and maintains that Grimes fired upon his men first.
Several dozen people protested the New Orleans Police Department on Thursday morning to demand justice for Grimes' death.
A mix of people walked paced in front of a police station carrying signs with slogans like "Down with the government" and shouting to passers-by "You could be next!"
A group of black ministers and advocates has called for the department to be purged of "trigger-happy" officers and the Grimes family's attorney, Richard Jenkins is certain an investigation will show rogue cops and sloppy police work.
"I just think it was some bad officers who were out there and imposing their will on the community," Jenkins said.
The shooting of Grimes by the NOPD marks the third high media incident of an officer or officers shooting a seemingly innocent black male thus far in 2009.
In Oakland, Calif, a BART officer shot a 22-year-old black male in the back on New Year's Eve. The slaying was caught on multiple videos, all of which showed the man unarmed, subdued and helpless. The city is still struggling to contain the public's reaction to what appears to be an execution.
Also, in Houston, a 23-year-old black male was shot in his own home's driveway by a white police officer during the early hours of New Year's Eve. According to published reports, the officer thought the man's vehicle was stolen. An internal investigation is underway. While the department has denied allegations of racial profiling related to the shooting, no effort to explain why the officer suspected the vehicle to be stolen has been offered.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/N._Orleans_cops_shoot_man_in_0109.html
A friend of mine was in court today. He brought charges against the Broward Sheriff's Office (I believe it was BSO, might have been Ft. Lauderdale). He won $80,000 in the court case, the judge made her verdict immediately.
My friend is a wealthy business man and owner of an upscale hotel among other businesses. Basically it went like this. The cops went into a high-end bar to serve him for a court appearance. They told him to step outside to serve him, and he asked them if he was under arrest, they said no, so he told them to serve him right there. They grabbed him and dragged him out into the street and arrested him, took him to jail. He committed no crime.
As I said, today he was awarded $80,000 in damages and the judge said it was a civil rights infringement. He looked at the cops after the verdict and said "justice is served."
Unfortunately though, justice wasn't served. The cops only had to pay $50 and the other $79,950 will be paid by tax-payers.
asus
[What a Crock of Shit the Internal Affairs Investigator Says]
Officer Will Not Face Charges In Shoving Of 71-Year-Old Wal-Mart Greeter
posted January 6, 2009
Chattanooga Police Det. Kenneth Freeman will not face charges in an incident in which he shoved a 71-year-old greeter at the Wal-Mart in Collegedale to the floor after he tried to stop him while doing a receipts check.
Collegedale Police declined to bring charges, then the employee, Bill Walker, filled out a complaint himself. Collegedale Judge Kevin Wilson has reviewed the complaint and did not issue an assault charge.
In the incident on Christmas Eve, Mr. Walker said an alarm went off when Det. Freeman and another city police officer, Edwin McPherson, were leaving the store.
http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_141946.asp
He said he reached to try to stop Det. Freeman and he was pushed against a soft drink machine and to the floor. He said the officer then hovered over him as he lay on the floor.
A police report says a customer then told Det. Freeman, "You can't push down an old man" and began struggling with him. It says Det. Freeman then shoved that man, Gholom Ghassedi, through a glass door. Officers found Mr. Ghassedi with blood on his neck, but he declined medical treatment.
Sgt. McPherson broke up the fight between Det. Freeman and Mr. Ghassedi.
Rick Watkins of Wal-Mart said an alarm was sounded when the 48-year-old Freeman walked by, causing Mr. Walker to try to stop him. Sgt. McPherson had already stopped for a receipt check.
An officer from the Chattanooga Police Department's Internal Affairs division arrived at the scene to look into the incident.
Cpl. Larry Robbins Jr. of the Collegedale Police said he decided not to bring assault charges against Det. Freeman, saying the incident was a misdemeanor not committed in the presence of an officer, there were no injuries requiring medical attention, the suspect is not a flight risk, and "there were no other crimes committed along with the possible simple assault."
He said the investigation would be ongoing, but he said he "was unable to determine at the scene that there was any intent to commit an assault."
Collegedale Officer Paul Crosby said when he arrived at the scene he found a large group of people gathered outside the door of the store. He said some "were obviously angry and were pointing fingers and yelling."
He said one man was "livid" and was pointing his finger at Det. Freeman while saying, "You are a police officer? Shame on you."
Det. Freeman was involved in a scuffle with attorney Lloyd Levitt at the Courts Building in May 2007.
Questions surround shooting of baseballer's sonStory Highlights
23-year-old son of former baseball star shot in his driveway by police officer
by Ed Lavandera
(CNN) -- Robbie Tolan sits in a Houston, Texas, hospital bed with a bullet from a police officer's gun lodged in his liver. The son of a famed baseball player was shot in his own driveway.
Robbie Tolan was shot December 31 by a police officer in his driveway. He was unarmed.
But how this unarmed 23-year-old and his cousin ended up in the cross-hairs of an officer's gun, suspected of stealing a car, is a question sparking allegations of racial profiling.
"There's no doubt in my mind that if these had been white kids this does not happen," said David Berg, Tolan's attorney.
It was 2 a.m. on December 31 when Tolan and his cousin, Anthony Cooper, were confronted in the driveway of their home by Bellaire, Texas, police officers. Police officials say the officers suspected the two young men were driving a stolen car.
Robbie Tolan is the son of a once-prominent professional baseball player. His father, Bobby Tolan, had a 15-year career for the St. Louis Cardinals and Cincinnati Reds, spanning 1965 to 1979. He played on one of the most-heralded Cardinal teams ever: the 1967 World Series champs.
The younger Tolan is just starting to develop his own baseball career. He's played in the Washington Nationals minor league system and spent part of last season playing for the Bay Area Toros of the Continental Baseball League.
Tolan's relatives say the two young men had just arrived from a late-night run to a Jack-in-the-Box fast food restaurant.
As they walked up the driveway to their home, Anthony Cooper said an unidentified man emerged from the darkness with a flashlight and a gun pointed at them.
"We did not know it was a police officer," said Cooper. "He said, 'Stop. Stop.' And we were like, 'Why? Who are you?'"
The officers ordered both men to lie down on the ground. Tolan's parents heard the commotion and came outside. Police will only say an "altercation" took place. Tolan's family say it involved his mother.
"The cop pushed her against the wall," said Tolan's uncle, Mike Morris.
Relatives say Tolan started to lean up from the ground to ask the officer what he was doing to his mother. That's when the family says Tolan was shot in the chest, the bullet piercing his lung and then lodging in his liver.
But Tolan's SUV wasn't stolen. Both men were unarmed and relatives say they were hardly a threat to the police officer. Anger over the shooting has been building over the last week.
"He was the victim of the worst case and worst kind of racial profiling," said community activist Quannel X.
The Bellaire Police Department has called the shooting "tragic" and put the officer involved in the incident on administrative leave.
"Anytime someone is injured we take it very seriously," said Byron Holloway, Assistant Chief of the Bellaire Police Department. "But any allegation of racial profiling, I don't think that's going to float."
The police department is investigating and the district attorney's office in Houston is also looking into whether charges will be filed against the police officer.
The policeman is a white, 10-year veteran of the force whom police say has an excellent record.
Bellaire Police officials are no longer talking publicly about the case. The department's assistant chief says they're investigating how the officers on the scene mistakenly determined that the SUV Tolan and his cousin were driving had been stolen.
Robbie Tolan remains in a Houston hospital. Relatives say he is in severe pain but is expected to recover. But his attorney says that Tolan's baseball career might be over.
Tolan's father isn't worried about that.
"I'm not concerned about his career as a baseball player. I'm concerned about his health," said Bobby Tolan.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/01/08/baseballer.shot/index.html?eref=rss_latest
FOLLOW-UP: Officer in BART shooting abruptly resigns
Demian Bulwa,Henry K. Lee, Chronicle Staff Writers
Thursday, January 8, 2009
(01-07) 19:14 PST OAKLAND -- The BART police officer who shot an unarmed man to death on a station platform early on New Year's Day quit the force Wednesday, avoiding an interview with police internal affairs investigators trying to get to the bottom of an incident that has prompted broad outrage.
Officer Johannes Mehserle, 27, was supposed to make a statement Wednesday about why he shot 22-year-old Oscar Grant as the supermarket worker lay face-down at the Fruitvale Station in Oakland, BART said.
Video recordings made by at least two BART passengers and shown repeatedly on TV news programs have prompted speculation that Mehserle fired without provocation or by accident after Grant and several friends were detained around 2 a.m. in the aftermath of a fight on a train.
Mehserle, however, did not show up for the scheduled interview at 11 a.m. - the same time the funeral for Grant began in his hometown of Hayward. Instead, the officer's attorney and the president of BART's police union appeared and handed over a short resignation letter, BART spokesman Linton Johnson said.
"We were prepared to compel him to talk, but he resigned," Johnson said. "We're going to continue the investigation, with or without him. ... There are many investigations that go on without the key person."
The resignation prompted cheers and applause when it was announced at an afternoon rally at the Fruitvale Station, where several hundred protesters called for the officer to be arrested and charged.
The protest was peaceful in the daytime but turned violent after dark as groups of people wandered through downtown streets, smashing storefronts and cars, including a police car, and setting some cars ablaze. Police officers in riot gear fired tear gas to break up the crowds, and BART temporarily shut down the Fruitvale, Lake Merritt and 12th Street stations.
Mehserle's resignation was effective immediately. Christopher Miller, an attorney for the officer, declined to say what Mehserle's explanation was for shooting Grant or why he had quit. He said Mehserle's defense would continue to be paid for by a statewide fund for police officers.
Mehserle's resignation means he does not have to answer questions about the shooting from BART internal affairs investigators. He has previously declined to talk to separate investigators from BART and the district attorney's office, who will decide whether he should be charged with a crime, officials said.
Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff said he plans to move quickly toward a decision on possible charges. Orloff met Wednesday with Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums' chief of staff, several elected officials and other community leaders who arrived at his Oakland office demanding information about the probe.
"These things normally take weeks rather than days, but I am trying to expedite this and get it resolved as quickly as we can," Orloff said.
BART had come under fire from John Burris, the attorney for Grant's family, for not having forced Mehserle to talk with internal affairs investigators since the shooting. Unlike in criminal investigations - in which a suspect has the constitutional right not to talk to police - officers involved in on-the-job shootings must talk to inspectors as part of administrative inquiries or risk being fired.
"I'm not surprised," Burris said of Mehserle's departure. "It should have happened long ago. It's not the end, of course, for the family. They would prefer that he be prosecuted and sent to jail."
Burris has filed a $25 million claim against BART on behalf of Grant's mother and 4-year-old daughter, the likely precursor to a lawsuit. In the claim, Burris said Mehserle "mercilessly fired his weapon" at Grant, who he said posed no threat to the officer or any of his colleagues on the Fruitvale Station platform.
Grant was unarmed when he was shot in the back; the bullet apparently went through him and ricocheted off the concrete platform, entering his torso. It was the ricochet wound that caused Grant's death, the Alameda County coroner's office said Wednesday.
BART's Johnson said Mehserle's attorney postponed a meeting between the officer and internal affairs investigators that had been set for Tuesday and wanted to reschedule it for next week. Instead, BART told Mehserle to show up Wednesday, Johnson said. He would not say where the interview was to have taken place.
BART, Mehserle and the officer's lawyer have all been silent about why Mehserle opened fire. But a source familiar with the investigation said BART is looking into whether Mehserle mistook his service weapon for a Taser stun gun, among many other possibilities.
For the first time, BART police Chief Gary Gee said Wednesday that Mehserle had been armed with a Taser. The agency has been using the devices for only a few weeks, and Gee said officers are prohibited from wearing them near their gun to avoid confusion.
Grant's death has attracted attention well beyond the Bay Area, driven in part by the fact that the shooting was filmed by at least two cell phone video cameras. Footage has been widely aired on television stations.
An official of the human rights group Amnesty International USA, Dalia Hashad, said Wednesday before Mehserle resigned that BART's delay in interviewing the officer "hints at the callousness to the worth of human life to a public that is all too familiar with racial profiling, police brutality and cover-ups."
Protesters who gathered at the Fruitvale Station on Wednesday, while cheering Mehserle's resignation, had nothing good to say about him.
"That's cowardice, if you are going to resign rather than talk," said Jemar "J. Smallz" Washington, 23, of Oakland.
Kelsi Arceneaux, 32, of Richmond said of the officer, "I'm sure he's suffering as well. But people's perception of him would be better if we could at least see that he's remorseful. Right now, we don't know anything."
E-mail the writers at dbulwa@sfchronicle.com and hlee@sfchronicle.com.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/07/MN2N155BAH.DTL&feed=rss.bayarea
Federal judge arrests Ala. sheriff over jail food
Jan 7, 10:46 PM (ET)
By JAY REEVES
DECATUR, Ala. (AP) - A federal judge ordered an Alabama sheriff locked up in his own jail Wednesday after holding him in contempt for failing to adequately feed inmates while profiting from the skimpy meals.
U.S. District Judge U.W. Clemon had court security arrest Morgan County Sheriff Greg Bartlett after dramatic testimony from skinny prisoners about paper-thin bologna and cold grits. The hearing offered a rare look into Alabama's unusual practice of letting sheriffs pocket money left over from feeding inmates.
The sheriff, who showed no emotion when his arrest was ordered, had testified that he legally kept as personal income about $212,000 over three years with surplus meal money but denied that inmates were improperly fed.
Clemon, however, said the sheriff would be jailed until he comes up with a plan to provide the 300 jail inmates with nutrionally adequate meals, as required by a 2001 court order.
Defense attorney Donald Rhea said Wednesday night that he faxed Clemon a proposal and hopes Bartlett will be quickly released. The sheriff had no comment as he was led from the courtroom.
Clemon said the Alabama law allowing sheriffs to take home surplus meal money is "probably unconstitutional" in certain cases, but his ruling was limited to the finding that the court order was violated. It didn't address whether the law should be overturned.
"He makes money by failing to spend the allocated funds for food for inmates," Clemon said.
An attorney representing the inmates, Melanie Velez of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, called Clemon's order to take the sheriff into custody "extraodinary." She said she was shocked to learn how much meal money Bartlett was taking home.
Sheriffs in 55 of Alabama's 67 counties operate under the system allowing them to make money operating their jail kitchens. The law pays sheriffs $1.75 a day for each prisoner they house and lets the elected officers pocket any profit they can generate.
The law doesn't require the leftover money to be spent at the jail or within the department; sheriffs can keep it as personal income. They historically have provided little information about profits under the practice that dates back to the Depression.
At the hearing, 10 prisoners told Clemon meals are so small that they're forced to buy snacks from a for-profit store the jailers operate. Most of the inmates appeared thin, with baggy jail coveralls hanging off their frames.
Some testified they spent hundreds of dollars a month at the store, which Bartlett said generates profits used for training and equipment.
Inmates told of getting half an egg, a spoonful of oatmeal and one piece of toast most days at their 3 a.m. daily breakfast. Lunch is usually a handful of chips and two sandwiches with barely enough peanut butter to taste.
"It looks like it was sprayed on with an aerosol can," testified Demetrius Hines, adding he's lost at least 35 pounds in five months since his arrest on drug charges.
Most prisoners said they supplement the meals by spending $20 a week or more on chips, oatmeal pies and other junk food at the jailhouse store.
But Sheriff Bartlett testified that he monitors the jail kitchen and occasionally eats there. He said he's certain he's meeting nutrition requirements under the settlement of a federal lawsuit regarding conditions at the jail.
Two nutritionists testifying on behalf of the sheriff said the jailhouse menu was proper, and they said some prisoners gain weight in jail.
Bartlett said he made about $95,000 last year feeding inmates after also receiving money from the county and the U.S. government for housing federal prisoners. Despite rising food costs, Bartlett said he made a $62,000 profit in 2007 and $55,000 in 2006.
Bartlett said he uses donations and special deals to make money. As an example, Bartlett said he and a neighboring sheriff recently split the $1,000 cost for an 18-wheeler full of corn dogs.
Prisoners testified they ate corn dogs twice a day for weeks.
Prisoners said they are almost always hungry after meals in the Morgan County jail, but the head of the Alabama Sheriff's Association said such a complaint is common around the state.
"You're never going to be able to satisfy them," said Bobby Timmons, the executive director of the association.
(This version CORRECTS Corrects spelling of lawyer's last name. Minor edits.)
(from JFSAG)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090108/ap_on_re_us/jail_food_bonus
Oakland Police Officer Shoots Unarmed Man Face Down Lying On The Floor
ktvu.com — BART-Police who patrol the Bay Area's subway system came to break up a fight. They had a 22 year old man named Omar Grant in handcuffs and on the ground when an officer shot him point blank in the head.
KTVU Video:
Drunk Judge Hits Police Car, Gets Slap On Wrist -- Cofield Accepted Into Alcohol Education Program
By CHRISTINE DEMPSEY | The Hartford Courant
4:57 PM CST, December 8, 2008
In a proceeding that took less than 15 minutes, a judge who police say was drunk when she drove into a parked state police cruiser -- and who allegedly made racist remarks after the collision -- was accepted into an alcohol education program today in Superior Court in Manchester.
Judge E. Curtissa Cofield, 60, sideswiped the patrol car in a Route 2 construction zone in Glastonbury Oct. 9 and was charged with driving under the influence and failure to drive in the proper lane. The state police initially said no one was injured, although the trooper's lawyer recently told the court the trooper had suffered some sort of arm injury.
Still, Judge William Bright Jr., opted to allow her to participate in the program, which, if successfully completed, could lead to the erasure of the charges against her in a year. Her next court date is Dec. 11, 2009.
Judge Cofield apologized to the community, the court, her friends, family and to the trooper, Michael Kowal, who was not present.
Judge Curtissa Cofield
There was no discussion of allegations she made racist comments while being processed in the Glastonbury police department, although Bright appeared to allude to them. The judge said that "anything that happened after the DUI is not relevant to the A.E.P application."
Sources told The Courant that Cofield, who is black, referred to a black state police sergeant who responded to the scene as "Negro Washington." Asked if she was suffering from an ailment, she said she had "Negro-itis," a source told the newspaper. She also used the "n" word, Courant columnist Kevin Rennie wrote last month.
Cofield was appointed to the bench in 1991. At the time of the accident, she was the presiding judge of Hartford's community court. She currently works in the civil court on Washington Street in Hartford.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/hcu-cofield-1208,0,322775.story
NYPD tells guy he's going to "break his camera over his face."
Agent Provocateur: I don't normally post international bad cop stories, but this is a tactic used by all police including U.S. domestic.
***
Police incite violence against other police while in disguise in order to have peaceful protesters arrested for more serious crimes that they never even committed or conspired to commit. It's a crime against humanity, it's anti-democratic, and it should be followed up with serious punishment. These cops make a mockery of our judicial system. They LIE at every opportunity and ensnare innocent civilians by fabricating entire stories instead of finding and prosecuting real criminals. This tactic has been documented in the U.S. as well.
http://www.noonehastodietomorrow.com/agenda/policestate/663?task=view
(from JFSAG)
Maryland Trooper Fired in Bizarre Drunken Chase Case
Posted: Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Updated: December 24th, 2008 09:40 AM GMT-05:00
A Maryland State Police trooper was fired after being charged with kidnapping a man in his marked police car during a chase in which the trooper was the one running from other officers.
Maryland State Police Officer Bruce Wrzosek, 22, had been suspended from duty earlier in the year after an incident in Baltimore city that was never prosecuted, 11 News I-Team lead investigative reporter Jayne Miller said.
Wrzosek went back to work in October but allegedly got involved in a much more serious case early Saturday in Towson.
Baltimore County police were called to a fast food restaurant at Loch Raven and Taylor avenues at about 2:30 a.m. Saturday after getting calls that a state trooper who appeared to be drunk was using a marked police car -- lights and sirens blaring -- to pull people over at the drive through.
According to court documents, a witness reported that "a drunken state trooper grabbed (one man) out of his car and put him in the police car."
Investigators said county police approached the trooper, but as they did, he took off, racing east on Taylor Avenue at a high rate of speed. The court documents said when the trooper finally stopped, he provided his Maryland State Police identification.
Miller reported that the trooper had trouble with a field sobriety test, allegedly admitting, "That's great. I'm drunk."
According to court documents, the fast food customer in the trooper's car told police, "He thought they were doing around 95 mph while on Taylor Avenue, and that (the trooper) scared the life out of him."
"The allegations made against this individual are very serious," said State Police Spokesman Greg Shipley.
He said the department's response to the allegations was swift. Wrzosek was fired by noon on Monday.
Wrzosek was off duty at the time of the incident, Miller reported. He was authorized to have a take-home police car.
On Saturday, investigators said Wrzosek's blood-alcohol content was 0.20 -- more than twice the legal limit.
http://www.officer.com/web/online/Top-News-Stories/Maryland-Trooper-Fired-in-Bizarre-Drunken-Chase-Case/1$44725
Tyranny is government denial of our Natural Rights. They are defined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The world is changing. People must speak up. Please share your stories of police abuse.
Judicial malfeasance, and other governmental violations are of interest.
CPS cases, illegal roadside check points, brutality cases, all violations of Posse Commitatus, etc.
http://oathkeepers.org/oath Any officials who take offense here please visit Oath Keepers.
http://gunowners.org/ They are your rights, hold on to them.
http://www.copblock.org/ A decentralized project supported by a diverse group of individuals
united by their shared goal of police accountability..
BUSTED: The Citizen's Guide to Surviving Police Encounters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqMjMPlXzdA&NR=1
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