Charges Dropped for 119 People
After Cop Caught on Video Planting Meth on Innocent Grandma
Jackson County, FL — Dozens of
innocent people who were rotting in jail have been freed and their charges
erased after the corrupt cop who put them there was caught on his own body
camera planting meth on an innocent mother. Jackson County Sheriff’s Deputy
Zachary Wester has since been fired and a slew of lawsuits are now rolling in.
Wester’s fall from law
enforcement grace and the 119 people who were exonerated are due largely in
part to the diligence of a single person, assistant state attorney at the 14th
Judicial Circuit, Christina Pumphrey.
Pumphrey’s job as assistant state
attorney included reviewing evidence before moving forward with charges against
individuals. When she began reviewing cases, she found something very peculiar.
“This is an exaggeration, but it
felt like his (Wester’s) name was on half the cases,” Pumphrey told The
Appeal.“It was seriously disproportionate.”
When Pumphrey began watching the
body camera footage from Wester’s arrests, she found something even more
disturbing. Many times, Wester was seen conducting illegal searches. Also, his
written affidavits did not match what she watched in the videos. But that
wasn’t the most telling aspect of all these videos.
While it is no question that
folks will claim that drugs found on them or in their possession “aren’t
their’s” and “they don’t know how that got there,” nearly all of Wester’s cases
had this. The videos showed that people were utterly shocked when Wester
claimed to have found drugs in their vehicles. While a single person may have
been lying, when everyone reacts the exact same way, something is up.
Although she reviewed multiple
videos, Pumphrey never saw the actual act of Wester planting drugs or otherwise
hiding them. However, all that changed when Wester pulled over Teresa Odom in
February of 2018.
In that video, Wester pulls Odom
over, claiming her tail lights aren’t working. However, it would later be
revealed that her tail lights were, in fact, working fine and Wester had
targeted her to frame her.
In the video, Wester is extremely
nice to the woman, complimenting her, joking around, and making small talk. But
in the back of his mind, he knew the entire time that he was going to plant
meth on her and have her thrown in a cage—an insidious move indeed.
After threatening to have a K-9
come search her car, Wester tells Odom that she can avoid the K-9 if she just
lets him search her truck himself—a huge mistake.
An LAPD officer accidentally
filmed himself putting cocaine in a suspect’s wallet
It’s reportedly the first LAPD
body camera video that the media and public have seen.
By German Lopez
Police officers can’t seem to
stop filming themselves potentially planting evidence.
The latest incident comes from
Los Angeles, where an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)
accidentally filmed himself placing cocaine in a suspect’s wallet, according to
a new report by CBS Los Angeles.
The body camera video shows
police picking up Ronald Shields, who was charged with felony hit-and-run,
having a gun in the trunk of his car, and cocaine possession in April. The
police report claimed cops had found the cocaine in Shields’s left pocket.
The footage tells a different
story. LAPD officer Gaxiola, as CBS Los Angeles identified him, picks up
Shields’s wallet from the street and shows it to another officer who then
points to Shields. Gaxiola then puts the wallet back down, picks up a small bag
of white powder from the street (which later tested positive for cocaine),
picks up the wallet, and puts the bag in the wallet.
The audio turns on, signaling
that the officer had manually activated his camera to record. Then, the officer
shows himself supposedly finding the wallet and the drugs inside of it, and
repeatedly telling other officers about it. “Just to let you know, sir, inside
his wallet, he has a little bag of narco,” Gaxiola said.
So what happened? The simple
explanation is that the officer apparently did not know that when he switches
on his body camera, it automatically records and saves the past 30 seconds,
although without audio.
Shields’s lawyer claims that the
officers outright planted the drugs to frame his client.
It’s possible, though, that the
cops tried to reenact the act of finding the cocaine for the cameras. But that
is still very deceptive — and when so clearly caught on video, it makes it hard
to trust the police officers with just about everything else they’re doing. It
makes a potentially credible case lose all credibility.
The LAPD is investigating the
incident. “The LAPD takes all allegations of misconduct seriously and, as in
all cases, will conduct a thorough investigation,” it said in a statement.
This isn’t the first time
something like this has happened. Previously, Baltimore police officers were
caught doing this — twice. That led the local prosecutor to drop dozens of
cases involving the officers.
According to CBS Los Angeles,
this is the first time that the media has seen LAPD body camera footage since
the force launched its program two years ago. It’s one hell of a debut.
