Written by Sheila
McLaughlin
The officer who
shot and killed Caleb Surface received a scathing performance review and was
suspended for job problems only a month before the fatal shots were fired
Saturday, personnel files show.
Those were some of
the details that emerged Tuesday as The Enquirer obtained several public
records for officer Scott Conklin from Fairfield police.
Those records –
including 911 calls and police radio transmissions – provide a more detailed
picture of the man who was shot, the officer who killed him and what happened
that night.
A recording of
police radio traffic indicates that Surface told Conklin that he had a gun
before the officer fired.
Seven minutes
earlier, an officer radioed that Surface was potentially suicidal.
“He was asking to be
shot and then he began to try to cut his wrists,” the unidentified officer said
on an areawide channel that could be heard by officers on the call. At least
five officers responded to look for Surface after the 8 p.m. altercation
between him and his father on Spyglass Hill Court.
The shooting of
Surface remains under investigation by the Ohio Bureau of Investigation. The
agency will turn a report over to the Butler County prosecutor who will present
it to as grand jury to see if charges against Conklin are warranted.
According to
Conklin’s personnel file, he appeared to be a seasoned officer who called in
sick a lot, showed up late for work and court, failed to follow up on
investigations and didn’t write the amount of tickets that were expected. He
went home on duty and spent too much time on personal cell phone calls, his
personnel file indicates.
When Conklin
failed to pay back another officer the $500 he borrowed, records say the
officer had to sue Conklin in small claims court.
Those problems put
him on quarterly performance reviews and were punished with a one-day
suspension in December.
Fairfield police
said they aren’t commenting on anything surrounding the case while it’s under
investigation.
Surface, 23, was
shot at least once and died on St. Andrews Court Saturday night after he fled
his father’s home when police arrived on the domestic violence call.
Jeff Surface, the
father, had confronted his son with a gun when he thought someone was breaking
into his home on Spyglass Hill Court. The two men struggled.
“He’s out of
control. He’s nuts,” Jeff Surface told a dispatcher.
Jeff Surface left
the phone and came back to tell the dispatcher that his son had gone into a
bedroom room and tried to “grab a knife or something.” Jeff Surface could be
heard telling his son to get out of his house and Surface telling his father
that he had no where to go.
“I almost had to
shoot him,” Jeff Surface told the dispatcher
He said his son
was under the influence of drug or alcohol.
In a separate 911
call, Jeff Surface’s girlfriend, Donna Riley, told a dispatcher that Surface
was “going berserk” on his father. She said a similar incident had occurred the
night before and Jeff Surface threw his son out of the house.
After Surface left
his father’s house Saturday, other 911 calls indicate Surface was knocking on
doors on a nearby street asking to use the phone.
A woman on Polo
Woods Court called 911 to report that a young man in a leather jacket came to
her door.
“He looked like he
had been crying and he was homeless,” the woman said.
She turned the man
away and he went to a neighbor’s house. Another man told police that the man
was in his back yard.
Conklin then spied
Surface going through the back yards and followed him to St. Andrews Court,
where the shooting occurred. Surface died about 25 minutes from the time his
father had called 911.
Surface had a
string of drug charges in Fairfield, and a judge had ordered him to stay away
from his father’s home in September, court records show.
In a statement on
Monday, the Surface family described Caleb Surface as a kind-hearted young man
who struggled with chemical dependency.
