Fairfax County Police Watch: Georgia Prosecutors Seek Indictment of Officer Who Shot Unarmed Man

By ALAN BLINDERJAN. 7, 2016

DECATUR, Ga. — A prosecutor here said Thursday that he would seek a felony murder indictment against a white police officer who last year shot and killed Anthony Hill, a black man who was naked and unarmed at the time of the fatal encounter.

“Our position is that the facts and the circumstances surrounding the shooting death of Anthony Hill warrant a charge for felony murder,” District Attorney Robert D. James Jr. of DeKalb County said at a news conference.

Mr. James’s decision to pursue a criminal case against Officer Robert Olsen does not guarantee an indictment, in part because Georgia offers law enforcement officers special protections when their on-duty behavior is being reviewed by a grand jury.

Mr. James said that prosecutors would ask grand jurors, when they meet on Jan. 21, to charge Officer Olsen with felony murder, aggravated assault, violation of oath of office and making a false statement.

Officer Olsen could not be reached for comment on Thursday. Neither a lawyer who has represented him, nor the DeKalb County Police Department, immediately responded to messages on Thursday, one day after Mr. James said Officer Olsen was notified of the government’s intention to request an indictment.

Officer Olsen’s conduct has been scrutinized since last March, when he was called to an apartment complex in Chamblee, northeast of Atlanta, and Mr. Hill approached and behaved erratically. Witnesses said that Mr. Hill, whose family said he had post-traumatic stress disorder after an Air Force deployment to Afghanistan, had raised his hands or placed them at his sides and that he did not obey Officer Olsen’s instructions to halt.

In November, Mr. Hill’s family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in Atlanta’s Federal District Court that accused Officer Olsen of using “illegal and excessive force” against Mr. Hill, 27. That case is pending.

Georgia law allows some public officials, including police officers, to attend meetings where grand jurors hear evidence that could yield an indictment. The law, which supporters say is a vital safeguard for officers who are often required to make immediate judgments in chaotic circumstances, also permits potential defendants to address the grand jury, unrebutted and without cross-examination, at the end of the prosecution’s presentation.

It is not clear whether Officer Olsen will speak to the grand jury this month, but he testified last year when a civil grand jury reviewed the shooting. In October, that panel recommended that officials continue their inquiry.

Lawyers here said that they would not be surprised if Officer Olsen addressed the grand jury, and they said such a choice could be central — perhaps even decisive — to his defense.

“It is going to go in the way of the police 99 times out of 100 if it’s a close call, or not even a close call,” said J. Tom Morgan, a former DeKalb County district attorney who is now in private practice. “It’s got to be very egregious for a police officer to be indicted when they’ve heard from the police officer as a last witness.”

But Lance LoRusso, a defense lawyer who works with the Georgia division of the Fraternal Order of Police, said the laws here afforded officers a crucial opportunity to explain their decisions and experiences, and he said the protections helped to curb potentially overzealous prosecutions.

“It’s a check and balance on the D.A.,” Mr. LoRusso said.

Although Georgia’s legal safeguards for police officers are among the country’s most generous, the state is one of more than a dozen that have enshrined protections for officers whose on-duty actions draw scrutiny. A police officer in Maryland, for instance, may wait 10 days before giving a statement to investigators. In Florida, a police officer has the right to be questioned by a single investigator.

Despite Mr. James’s words of caution about the ultimate authority of the grand jury, Mr. Hill’s girlfriend said Thursday that she welcomed the step toward a possible indictment, particularly at a time when white police officers elsewhere have not been prosecuted in the killings of unarmed black men.

“I’m glad that we have an officer off the streets,” Ms. Anderson said of Officer Olsen, who was placed on administrative leave after the shooting. “He murders people because he’s hiding behind the badge

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.