Dave McKenna
Anybody afraid of law enforcement should stay out of
Northern Virginia for the next few weeks. And anybody familiar with the police
in Northern Virginia should be afraid.
Starting on Friday, Fairfax County will host the
2015 World Police and Fire Games, the cop Olympics. It’s a huge deal for the
county. Organizers bill the soirée as “the second largest global multi-sport
event,” with only the real Olympics being bigger. Tony Shobe, sports director
for what’s being called Fairfax 2015, claims that about 25,000 visitors will
arrive to take part or spectate alongside the locals.
When the games were awarded, Fairfax County
supervisor Michael Frey gushed in a press release about all the wonders of the
area. “This is an outstanding opportunity for Fairfax County to showcase our
exceptional First Responders and the world-class destination that we are,” the
release read.
The sort of exceptionalism displayed by Fairfax
County law enforcement these days, however, isn’t something the locals really
want the world to look at. Take Tony Shobe’s workplace, for example. When not
promoting Fairfax 2015, he serves as commander of the Emergency Response Team
of the Fairfax County Sheriff’s Office—which is really the county jail’s
in-house SWAT team. His unit is now being scrutinized for the killing of
Natasha McKenna.
“You promised not to hurt me!”
McKenna, 37, suffered fatal injuries on Feb. 3 at
the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center. Authorities in Fairfax County
routinely clam up when its law enforcers kill unarmed citizens, which happens
pretty often. (In fact, if stonewalling were an event at this year’s Games, the
hometown cops would be the chalk.) But the information about McKenna’s killing
that has leaked out in subsequent months sounds like the stories that came out
of Abu Ghraib during the Iraq invasion.
In late January, McKenna was arrested after
employees of a Hertz outpost in Alexandria, Va., called police to report that
she was being disruptive while returning a rental car. She fled when the cops
arrived and was later detained by Fairfax County police on assault charges
filed by an officer from Alexandria, a neighboring jurisdiction, who alleged
McKenna threw a punch during the Hertz incident. Because the charges weren’t
from Fairfax, the county would not conduct psychological evaluations of its
prisoner, who had a history of mental illness, and decided to transport her to
Alexandria. Incident reports uncovered by Tom Jackman of the Washington Post
detail how a crew of sheriff’s department staffers—including six members of
Shobe’s Emergency Response Team wearing full hazmat suits over their standard
armored outfits—entered the 5-foot-3, 130-pound McKenna’s cell. The deputies
cuffed her arms behind her back, shackled her legs, applied a device known as a
“Ripp Hobble” to connect the arm and leg restraints and thereby further
restrict her movement, and put a hood over her head. They then electrocuted her
repeatedly with a taser set on 50,000-volts, according to the Post.
Tasers are designed to temporarily paralyze targets
by shutting down their muscular system with electric jolts, typically delivered
through probes shot into the skin. But when the standard methods didn’t
sufficiently incapacitate McKenna, Fairfax deputies removed the probes from
their taser and just pressed the device directly to her thigh and continued
zapping her. That technique, called a “drive stun,” is used strictly to inflict
pain on a target, not cause muscular incapacitation; further, stun guns are not
recommended for use on mentally ill targets. McKenna’s heart stopped while the
deputies were restraining her, and she died when taken off life support
machines a few days later. The deputies reported that as they were inflicting
mortal damage upon her, McKenna was yelling, “You promised not to hurt me!”
Fairfax County authorities listed McKenna’s death as
“accidental” after a coroner ruled that she died of “Excited Delirium during
physical restraint, including the use of a conductive energy device.” What
happened hardly seems accidental. But the county has essentially taken a
“Deputies don’t kill prisoners, tasers kill prisoners” stance. The use of
tasers in the jail has been suspended, but no charges have been filed against
anybody involved in the killing.
The outrage over McKenna’s death has grown over the
months, as the Post’s continued reporting and editorializing on the matter have
been picked up by other media outlets. But legal authorities in Fairfax County
have done nothing obvious to quell it. The Fairfax County Sheriff’s Office said
shortly after McKenna’s death that the jailhouse incident was captured by
security cameras, but those videos have not been made public. The names of the
public servants who killed McKenna have not been released, either.
The behavior of the law enforcement community in the
county, rather, has provided a study in stalling. Take the county’s inert
handling of the taser used in McKenna’s killing. On April 21, about two and a
half months after McKenna was killed, Fairfax County police posted a statement
about how the weapon used to kill McKenna would be “inspected and analyzed to
ensure it was working within designed specifications.” Subsequent updates—one
on May 22, another on June 18—have reiterated that the weapon is being tested.
Exactly why it’s taken nearly five months to perform these tests is unclear.
“I don’t want to die today!”
An awful truth about the glacial pace and complete
lack of transparency in the investigation of McKenna’s killing is that this how
it always goes in Fairfax County.
As the police Olympiad opens, in fact, the Fairfax
County cops still have the killing of John Geer hanging over their heads.
In August
2013, Geer was shot by an FCPD officer in broad daylight while standing in the
doorway of his home, unarmed and with his hands up. The police had been called
to investigate a domestic dispute between Geer and his longtime partner, and
his killing occurred not long after Geer told the lawman who would end up
killing him, “I don’t want to die today.” Friends, family and neighbors were
among those who saw him killed. Several Fairfax County cops who were on the
scene told superiors within the department that one of their own, Officer Adam
Torres, had no good reason to fire the shot that killed Geer. Photographs taken
by neighbors just before the killing show him with his arms up. But despite all
the in-house testimony and civilian witnesses, Fairfax County Commonwealth’s
Attorney Ray Morrogh declined to file charges against Torres. In fact, Torres
remains on the FCPD payroll. The county refused to even tell Geer’s family who
killed their kin for 16 months, and only released that information after the
U.S. Department of Justice and Senator Charles Grassley got involved. Only
because of that outside pressure, a grand jury was empaneled in early June to
decide whether to indict Torres for the killing. But that grand jury won’t meet
until the end of July; the hold-up makes no sense, unless Morrogh didn’t want
the proceedings going on while the cop Olympics crowd was in town.
Officials in Fairfax County, Va., apparently hoped
to use the cover of Super Bowl weekend to help…Read more
theconcourse.deadspin.com
If Torres is indicted, it will be the first time in
the history of the Fairfax County Police Department that an officer has been
charged for an improper shoot. In recent years, FCPD officers have been cleared
in the shooting death of Sal Culosi, an unarmed optometrist who’d been accused
of accepting football bets from an undercover officer, and in the killing of
David Masters, who was unarmed and sitting in the driver’s seat of his car.
stopped at a stoplight when a cop shot him in the back. In explaining why he
wasn’t prosecuting Masters’ killer, Morrogh initially told the public that the
victim was not shot in the back by the police officer, despite eyewitnesses, an
autopsy, and photographic evidence to the contrary. Those mulling whether to
travel to Fairfax County during the cop Olympics should note that the place has
a history of allowing police officers from other jurisdictions to get away with
murder, too. In 2000, undercover officer Carlton B. Jones was sitting in an
unmarked car when he shot unarmed Howard University student Prince Jones (no
relation) five times in the back in the Falls Church section of Fairfax County
in what the officer said was a case of mistaken identity. Former Fairfax County
prosecutor Robert Horan declined to indict Carlton B. Jones or even bring the
case to a grand jury.
It's been nine years since police in Fairfax County,
Va., turned small-time bettor Sal Culosi…Read more Read more
“This is a very sad day in Fairfax County, when the
commonwealth’s attorney legitimizes murder,” Ted Williams, an attorney for
Prince Jones’ family, told the Washington Post at the time.
Fairfax’s reputation has led Geer’s loved ones to
temper their expectations that they will get justice.
“I think we’re passed the stalling phase, and now
we’re at the roadblock phase,” says Jeff Stewart, a close friend of Geer’s and
witness to his killing. “I’m trying to keep an open mind about this. But no
officer has ever been charged in the history of the department. How long do you
go before that record becomes questionable? How long before that’s considered
too good to be true? I know this: If this Fairfax County officer doesn’t get
indicted, no officer ever will get indicted.”
FCPD’s investigation was moving so slowly, in fact,
that Geer’s family settled its civil suit with the county without even waiting
for the criminal proceedings to play out. The county will pay his estate $2.95
million.
“I have never seen anything like it in my 22 years
in insurance,” says Chris Carey. He’s the administrator of the Virginia
Association of Counties Group Self-Insurance Risk Pool (VACoRP), the insurance
underwriter that holds the liability policy for the Fairfax County Police
Department and its employees.
Carey says standard operating procedure for VACoRP
in cases involving alleged police malfeasance is for all parties to wait until
the criminal investigations and prosecutions run their course. “The criminal
stuff [in the Geer case] took so long to adjudicate that we decided, along with
the plaintiffs, to just get out of it.”
The settlement in the Geer suit is being called the
largest amount ever paid by a county government in Virginia in a wrongful death
suit. Fairfax County is responsible for the first $1 million. The rest will
come from VACoRP’s coffers.
The policy with Fairfax County has an exclusion
against covering “personal injury or property damage brought about or
contributed to by the fraudulent, dishonest or criminal behavior of any covered
person.” That means that if Ofcr. Torres were convicted of a crime related to
the killing of Geer, VACoRP would not have had to pay out a dime. Yet VACoRP
agreed to pay out its share of the settlement—$1.95 million—rather than wait to
see if that happened.
“I’m kind of thinking: Do I think there’s a chance
he gets indicted? Do I think there’s a chance he gets convicted?” Carey says.
“And, geez, I don’t think so.”
Anybody brave enough to visit Fairfax for the Games
might be attracted to the featured entertainment offering from organizers: A
tour of the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center. Space is limited.
________________________________________
Natasha McKenna is not related to the writer of this
story. Contact the writer at dave.mckenna@deadspin.com. Illustration by Jim
Cooke
THESE COMPANIES ARE SPONSORING THE FAIRFAX COUNTY POLICE COP GAMES...proud of yourselves?
