Fairfax County Police Watch: More drunk and drugged up cops

Oswego cop charged with selling drugs was sued, suspended

Oswego, NY – Troy Martin retired Oswego police officer charged Thursday with selling drugs has faced suspension as well as accusations of excessive force and misconduct during his career. Martin, was charged with third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance and fourth-degree conspiracy. Oswego police confirmed Martin is retired from the department and said that he was not part of the department while the drug investigation he was swept up in was under way.

According to Post-Standard archives, Martin and Officer Michael Kearns were accused of raping a woman in 1993. The woman, who at the time was 25, filed a $36 million lawsuit in July 1994 against the city, Kearns and Martin.

Criminal charges were never filed against Martin or Kearns. The woman didn't file charges because she didn't want to appear before a grand jury or in criminal court, said one of her lawyers at the time.

The city settled the lawsuit out-of-court in 1997 for $50,000.

In 1997, the city also settled another case in which Martin was accused of causing personal and emotional injuries. That case was settled for $27,000 according to newspaper archives.

In 1993 Martin and Kearns were suspended without pay for 30 days.

When Martin was a campus police officer at the State University College at Oswego, the state Court of Claims determined that he and another officer used excessive force in arresting a college student in 1985. The student was awarded $1,200 in damages.

Martin retired from the Oswego Police Department in 2006 and receives an annual pension of $24,333, according to state records.

St. Louis cop gets probation in drunken driving case

Michael Schinner, a t. Louis police officer, was sentenced to five years probation for driving while intoxicated and causing injuries. l Schinner, then 27, was off-duty and speeding the wrong way on a one-way street early in the morning on Dec. 24, 2011, when his vehicle collided with a St. Louis patrol car. On-duty Officer Darryl Monroe suffered hip and leg injuries, according to officials.

A passenger in Schinner’s vehicle, Brian Cole, then 28, sustained serious head trauma, including bleeding on his brain, but has since recovered. Schinner, who had been a member of the police force for three years, claimed no memory of the crash, but he appeared disoriented and had a strong alcoholic odor on his breath, according to court documents.

There were two empty beer bottles in his car — one on the driver’s side floorboard — and he refused to submit to a blood test to determine his blood-alcohol content, according to the documents. Police did not apply for a search warrant to force him to provide a blood sample.Schinner was suspended from the force without pay after the crash, and resigned in August 2012.

Police officer charged with DWI, resigns

RALEIGH, N.C. — A senior officer in the Cary Police Department resigned her job after an arrest early Thursday on charges she was driving while impaired.Tiffany Dawn Silsbee, of 2600 Broad Oaks Place in Raleigh, sideswiped four vehicles along Raleigh's Boylan Avenue, according to police.After the crash, she had a .09 blood alcohol content.

FBI: Pa. police officer arrested on drug charges

-- The FBI says a Pennsylvania police officer has been arrested and charged with distributing drugs. Agent Edward J. Hanko says in a release that Robert F. Evans, a Hughestown Borough Police officer, was arrested without incident Friday morning and charged with the distribution of oxycodone. That's just outside Scranton. According to an affidavit Evans admitted obtaining oxycodone pills from a friend and through a prescription, selling the pills over the past year, and driving a client to Wilkes-Barre in a Hughestown police cruiser so the client could buy illegal drugs. Evans couldn't be reached for comment.

TEXAS COP ARRESTED FOR FELONY DWI WITH KIDS IN TOW

A Texas police officer has been arrested and charged with felony driving while intoxicated, the Houston Chronicle reported recently. The officer was arrested in Beaumont, Texas, about 80 miles outside of Houston. According to the report, the charges were increased from standard DWI to state jail felony DWI because the driver's three children were allegedly present in the vehicle at the time of the incident.

A Prichard police officer has been arrested on some serious drug charges.

PRICHARD, Ala. (WPMI) A Prichard police officer has been arrested on some serious drug charges. Officer Edmond Burke was arrested during a Mobile County Sheriff's Office sting. Deputies say Burke tried to buy five kilos of cocaine from an undercover officer. Burke has been charged with trafficking cocaine, possession of a controlled substance, and marijuana possession. Trafficking is a class-A felony that carries a sentence of up to life in prison. Burke is a Prichard native, and has been on the force about a year and a half. He has been on the other side of the law before. He was arrested in 2006 for possession of a controlled substance, and in 2000, for interfering with custody.

State trooper blames Chan for crash that killed off-duty cop

WOBURN Off-duty Lowell Police Officer Patrick "P.J." Johnson was drunk as he rode his Harley Davidson Road King at speeds between 75-80 mph when he collided with a Honda Accord -- a crash that took his life -- a State Police accident reconstructionist testified it wasn't Johnson's speed that cause the crash, it was the other car crossing his path.

In Middlesex Superior Court on Friday, Roderick, an accident reconstructionist, testified that based on his calculations, the 31-year-old Johnson, a six-year veteran of the Lowell Police Department, was barreling down Princeton Boulevard during the early-morning hours of Sept. 11, 2010 at a minimum speed of 75 mph and perhaps as fast as 80 mph based on the motorcycle's broken speedometer.

Roderick testified that at the same time, Chan, 28, of Lowell, who police allege was also legally drunk, was at the intersection of Foster Street and Princeton Boulevard when he drove into Johnson's path. Johnson hit the brakes, leaving a skid mark 32.5 feet long, Roderick testified. Johnson and his motorcycle slammed into the right front quarter of Chan's car. The impact tossed Johnson, a husband and father of two, more than 100 feet where he landed two houses down.

He died within minutes of the crash, state Medical Examiner Marie Cannon testified Thursday. The cause of his death was blunt trauma to the head, torso and lower extremities, Cannon said.

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.