Elkhart police Lt. Brent Long
was suspended for four days and put on probation for forwarded emails including
graphic photos and beer commercials.
Emily Pfund
Documents released to The
Elkhart Truth on Friday, Dec. 5, shed a little more light on an investigation
into inappropriate emails sent from the work accounts of three Elkhart police
officers to various city employees.
Disciplinary hearings for two
of the officers — Det. Scott Weaver and Lt. Peggy Snider — are scheduled for
Dec. 19 and Jan. 19, respectively. Chief Laura Koch has requested the Elkhart
Board of Public Safety fire Snider and demote Weaver and suspend him for four
days.
The case for the third officer,
Lt. Brent Long, was decided Nov. 12. He was suspended for four days and placed
on probation for one year.
INVESTIGATION LAUNCHED
The emails were apparently
uncovered during the discovery process for an unrelated lawsuit filed against
the city by a former employee. Chad Dyer, a former network administrator for
the city’s information technology department, filed a lawsuit in June 2013
alleging the city did not pay him overtime for which he was eligible and
eventually fired him after he asked the city to review his job classification.
He claims that when he asked the city to review his job classification — which said
his position was not eligible for overtime — and pay him for the overtime work
he had done, his requests were ignored and he was eventually fired.
Dyer’s suit, filed in United
States District Court for the Northern District of Indiana, argues he was fired
because he insisted that the city comply with the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Scott Duerring, Dyer’s
attorney, said the case is still in the discovery phase and a trial date has
not been set yet.
“My understanding is that the
city was going through information based on a request we made and that’s how
they supposedly found these other emails,” Duerring said of the emails that
prompted disciplinary action against the three officers.
The Elkhart Police Department
has declined to comment on how the emails were discovered.
LONG’S EMAILS
The emails that prompted the
disciplinary action against Long, obtained by The Elkhart Truth through the
Indiana Access to Public Records Act, include seven messages with video or
photo attachments sent between January 2009 and January 2011.
One of Long’s emails shows
photos of a man who jumped off a ledge on a building while running from police
in Atlanta in 2003 and was decapitated after landing on a fence. The photos
show the man’s body lying in a pool of blood in a parking lot and his head
still on the fence.
Another includes a video of a
man being electrocuted by touching a power line while standing atop a stopped
train.
In one of the videos, a man is
seen dancing backwards into a busy street and being struck by an ice cream
truck.
Some of the content included in
the emails are television commercials. A commercial for Heineken shows a group
of women screaming in excitement while looking at a massive walk-in closet. A
group of men has the same reaction standing in a walk-in freezer stocked with
beer.
<p>
In another commercial, this one
for a cell phone carrier, a woman tries to surprise her significant other with
a pole dance in their living room, but the pole collapses.
Two of the videos include
police actions. One was recorded by a police dash cam and shows an officer
arresting a man who appears to be intoxicated and was driving a hydraulic lift
down the street.
Another shows a group of men,
identified in the email as bank robbers, running out of a building and into a
car just before a group of police officers run past them and into the building.
The video is not a real robbery, but was part of a commercial, according to
hoax-debunking site Snopes.com.
There is no comment from Long
in the body of any of the emails. The emails were forwarded to various other
accounts without comment. The email files provided to The Elkhart Truth did not
include the recipients Long sent the messages to.
Requests for the emails involved
in the disciplinary actions against Snider and Weaver are still pending with
the city’s legal department, as is a request for a copy of the city’s email and
computer use policies.
Long declined to comment Friday
afternoon.
