Fairfax County Police Watch: Prisoner escape leads to pair of officer suspensions

By Robert Maxwell

AUSTIN (KXAN) – Two Austin police officers are off the job starting Wednesday for a total of 11 unpaid days each after allowing a prisoner to escape last October.

The prisoner was being transported from the emergency room at University Medical Center Brackenridge on Oct. 13, 2013, to the Travis County Jail.

A disciplinary memo shows Officer Leonard Wheeler and the driver, Officer Shawn Williams, failed to seatbelt the handcuffed prisoner. Additionally, neither officer checked the latch and lock on the transport van’s door handle, allowing the prisoner to escape.

Further more, neither officer followed protocol when they did not immediately alert their chain of command of the escape. The memo states that lapse in judgment put the public at risk.

Ofc. Wheeler only told his sergeant what had happened after the prisoner had been recaptured.

This is not the first time Wheeler has been reprimanded. Austin’s police chief suspended Wheeler for seven days last October for failing to comply with APD policies on the care and transport of prisoners. That time he failed to turn on his body camera while transporting a prisoner, something he again failed to do after the prisoner escape in October, the newest memo shows.

“In this incident,” Chief Art Acevedo wrote, “Officer Wheeler has again failed to satisfactorily perform his duties.”

The chief also wrote the new suspension memo may be taken into consideration when Wheeler comes up for promotion.

This also is Williams’ second recent suspension. The chief pulled him off the job Aug. 15 for six days for neglect of duty after he failed to write up a two-car crash that involved a minor who had been drinking alcohol, according to the disciplinary memo released then.

In justifying the new 11-day suspension, the chief noted October’s prisoner escape happened just two months after Williams finished his first suspension. He, too, could be bypassed for future promotion according the chief’s memo.

Each officer can appeal the new suspensions within 10 days.

City of Austin employee records show Ofc. Leonard Wheeler, 33, has been with APD since November 2005. Ofc. Shawn Williams, 30, has been with APD since September 2006.

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.