Fairfax County Police Watch: Ex-police officer, daughter dead in Fairfax murder-suicide

Tue, 2012-03-27 19:00

A former Fairfax County police officer and his teenage daughter were found dead in a sport-utility vehicle Tuesday in what authorities said was an apparent murder-suicide.

Police received a call reporting a shooting at about 1:15 a.m. Tuesday. When officers arrived at a home on the 3800 block of Forest Grove Drive in Annandale, they found an SUV parked in the driveway that contained two bodies with gunshot wounds, Fairfax County police spokeswoman Mary Ann Jennings said.

Authorities identified the two as 40-year-old John Jackson, a 16-year veteran for the county police department who resigned in June 2010, and his daughter, 13-year-old Alexis Jackson.

Officer Shelley Broderick, another police spokeswoman, said a medical examiner will determine which death was a homicide and which was a suicide. She said it would be "overstepping" to make that determination before receiving the medical examiner's report.

Broderick said she had no information about what sparked the incident and would not say whether a weapon was recovered.

"That's all under investigation," she said.

A family member found the Jacksons shortly after 1 a.m. and the two are believed to have died between midnight and 1 a.m., police said. John and Alexis Jackson lived in Falls Church and the SUV was parked outside the home of another relative, Broderick said.

Alexis was a seventh-grade student at Glasgow Middle School in Alexandria, according to John Torre, a spokesman for Fairfax County Public Schools.

Broderick said she didn't know why Jackson left the police force or what he had been doing since leaving the department. The phone number listed for him in public records went to his voicemail at John and Robs Services, a family trash-hauling business.

The company's website says it was founded in 1952 by Joseph F. Jackson under the name Jackson and Sons General Hauling and Trash Removal. Two of Joseph Jackson's sons, Robert and John, took over the business in 1998, the website says.

No one at the Woodbridge-based business answered the phone or responded to an email Tuesday. A phone number listed for Jackson's Falls Church home was disconnected.

Morrogh finds cop he doesn’t love. In other news, hell freezes.

Probe of fatal police shooting goes to federal authorities

By Justin Jouvenal/Post

The Fairfax County prosecutor has turned over the investigation of a fatal police shooting of an unarmed Springfield man to federal authorities, citing complications with the five-month-old case.

Commonwealth’s Attorney Ray Morrogh said the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia has agreed to continue the probe into the death of 46-year-old John Geer, who was shot during a standoff with Fairfax County police in August. No one has been charged in the incident.

“There is a conflict of interest that has arisen in the case,” Morrogh said Thursday. “And there is a second potential conflict of interest that has arisen out of my office. . . . This is the prudent thing to do.”

Morrogh declined to describe the nature of the conflicts because the investigation is ongoing. The U.S. attorney’s office said Thursday that it could not confirm or deny any investigation or comment on pending investigations.

Police went to Geer’s Pebble Brook Court home on Aug. 29 because of a report of a domestic disturbance. Geer’s father, Don Geer, said his son was upset because his girlfriend, the mother of his two children, had decided to leave him.

John Geer had thrown his girlfriend’s belongings in the front yard. She called police and told them that Geer had a firearm. Police said they tried for about 50 minutes to persuade Geer to leave the home, but he refused.

Don Geer said he watched the climax of the encounter. He said that he could not hear what officers were saying to his son but that he saw him standing with empty hands resting on top of a screen door at the home’s entrance.

At some point, John Geer began to slowly lower his hands and an officer opened fire, hitting Geer in the chest, his father said. Geer retreated inside and closed the door. A SWAT team eventually entered the home and found Geer dead.

Don Geer said detectives later told him that his son did not have a gun on him at the time of the shooting but that there was a holstered handgun a couple of steps from the front door.

Don Geer said it appeared to him that the shooting was unjustified, but he was unsure what to make of the probe being turned over to federal authorities.

“I don’t know whether that’s good or bad — if I had a better idea of why they are doing it, I could form an opinion,” he said.

Geer and friends of his son have been critical of how long the investigation has taken, but Morrogh said police and prosecutors were working to explore all the evidence. He did not think federal prosecutors would have to start from scratch.

“No one wants these things to linger on,” Morrogh said.

Our ink will outlast his career

Under the reign of former Chief of Police Rhorer the Fairfax County Police arrested a man for not wearing clothes in his house while he made coffee, set up an eye doctor on a gambling charge and then used the SWAT team to kill him. An investigation into the charge that the Doctor’s primary clients were cops has never been investigated. The police gunned down an emotionally unstable man because cop who shot him wrongly assumed the man was trying to escape. He wasn’t. The cops also shot dead four other citizens under highly questionable circumstances. The department under Rhorer was sued multiple times by citizens. So did they fire Rhorer? Naw they promoted him. According to news reports Rhorer draws a salary of $191,168 per year as Deputy Fairfax County Executive as well as a concurrent pension from the Fairfax County police of $173000 per year.

Occupation by force

According to the most recent U.S. Census figures, nearly one in five Fairfax residents (17.5 percent) is of Asian descent while Hispanics make up nearly 16 percent of Fairfax’s overall population. Those numbers drop considerably when applied to the Fairfax County Police Department, where only 4.3 percent of officers are Asian and 4.1 percent Hispanic. White officers make up 84 percent of Fairfax County’s 1,360-member police department, significantly higher than the county’s general population (54 percent white). Almost 90% of the force lives outside the county.