Fairfax County Police Watch: Fairfax County identifies police officer Adam Torres as shooter of John Geer

By Tom Jackman, Washington Post.

Sixteen months after a Fairfax County police officer shot and killed a Springfield man, officials for the first time Monday identified the officer as Adam D. Torres, and made a new claim that the man had a loaded gun nearby and threatened to use it.

The longtime partner of John B. Geer, 46, had called police on Aug. 29, 2013, after she told him she was leaving him and he responded by throwing her belongings out of their house. In a statement released Monday, police said they were told Geer not only had “multiple firearms” inside the townhouse but also that he was “displaying a firearm that he threatened to use against the police.” That statement contradicts previous witness accounts that Geer was unarmed when he was shot.

The attorney for Geer’s family, Michael Lieberman, strongly disputed the claim that Geer displayed a gun and threatened to use it. “I’ve never heard of him displaying any firearm at the police and I have no reason to believe he did,” Lieberman said. Don Geer, John Geer’s father, said he was told by police that his son was unarmed when he was shot.

Fairfax police declined to answer any questions about the statement or clarify when Geer displayed or threatened to use a gun. The handgun found inside the house was loaded and holstered, the statement said.

Fairfax officials did not notify Geer’s family or their lawyers that they planned to release the officer’s name and new details about the case, Lieberman said.

The statement also said that Geer refused officers’ requests to stay outside and speak with them, and that “a trained negotiator” tried to resolve the confrontation. But when Geer began lowering his hands from the top of his storm door after more than 30 minutes of discussions, “PFC Adam Torres fired a single shot that struck Geer.”

The statement said “Geer did not answer the officers’ calls and offers of medical aid.” Police waited for an hour — and for the arrival of a SWAT team and a hostage rescue vehicle — before entering Geer’s home, where he was found dead.

Fairfax said that “a loaded, holstered firearm was recovered on the landing of the stairs to Geer’s left where he had stood in the doorway and seven more firearms were recovered inside the home.”

Lieberman said he had never heard of a negotiator speaking with Geer and that the seven other guns in the house were in a locked safe.

Police said Torres is an eight-year veteran of the department and assigned as a patrol officer to the West Springfield district, but they declined to release his age. He has been on administrative duties since the shooting.

Torres could not be immediately located for comment. He has not been involved previously in any fatal police shootings in Fairfax.

The investigation of whether Torres should be charged with a crime was handled for four months by the Fairfax commonwealth’s attorney, who transferred the case in January 2014 to the U.S. attorney in Alexandria. Federal officials are considering whether to file civil rights charges in the case, but Fairfax Board Chairman Sharon Bulova said Monday she had no indication when that might be.

County officials said they felt the information release was appropriate after a Fairfax judge in the Geer family’s civil lawsuit against Fairfax last month ordered a vast amount of pretrial discovery to be released to the family. Before that, the police had refused to disclose Torres’s name or anything about him, or any details about why Torres might have shot Geer.

Bulova said county officials were frustrated by their inability to release information, but abided by policies that had worked in previous police shootings: to wait for a ruling on whether a crime was committed before discussing a case. But she said after 16 months, and the ruling in the civil case by Fairfax Circuit Court Judge Randy I. Bellows, she met Monday with Fairfax Police Chief Edwin C. Roessler Jr. and both felt the time was right to release the information.

Bulova said the timing was unrelated to a planned protest outside the Fairfax police headquarters Thursday by a group called Justice for John Geer, which recently formed to demand information about the shooting.

“This has just been an unusual situation,” Bulova said. “It was bumped up to the federal level for, I think, multiple reasons. And we were sort of left in limbo.”

Bulova said she did not know when the county’s lawyers would comply with Bellows’s order to release documents and other evidence to Geer’s family, but she said Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh did not object to the release. Bellows gave the county 30 days to provide the information.

Lieberman also said he did not know how or when he would receive the information. He said Monday’s statement appeared to be “damage control. To try to show they have some sense of transparency. A little late, I would say.”

Tom Jackman is a native of Northern Virginia and has been covering the region for The Post since 1998.

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.