DURHAM, N.C. — A Durham police
officer who arrested a teenager who shot himself in the head while handcuffed
in the back of a patrol car violated policies regarding transporting and
handling prisoners, Police Chief Jose Lopez said in a report to Durham’s city
manager on Friday.
Lopez said when Officer Samuel
Duncan picked up 17-year-old Jesus Huerta on the morning of Nov. 19 on a
misdemeanor trespassing charge, he failed to discover the Haskell .45
caliber-semi-automatic handgun in the teen’s possession.
Duncan, who had been with the
department for 16 months at the time, frisked Huerta’s pants and jacket pockets
and put him in the back of the patrol car, Lopez said, but he did not find a
weapon. When they arrived at Durham police headquarters, a short time later,
the teen shot himself.
After separate investigations
by the State Bureau of Investigation and the police department’s Professional
Standards Division, Duncan received a 40-hour suspension without pay and
remedial training in transporting and handling prisoners.
Durham’s district attorney
announced last month that he would not pursue criminal charges in the case.
Alexander Charns, an attorney
for Huerta’s family, said Monday that the family is conducting its own
investigation into the teen’s death.
Charns said they believe police
should have thoroughly searched Huerta before putting him in the patrol car and
that Huerta, who had high levels of drugs in his system, should have been taken
to a hospital before police served the warrant for his arrest.
“Our community will judge the
appropriateness of the discipline imposed on the officer here, and how the
discipline compares to the discipline imposed on other officers,” the family
said in a statement. “We will all judge how the DPD moves forward to learn from
this tragedy and whether it will take the necessary affirmative steps to
prevent future in-custody deaths.”
Lopez’s report to City Manager
Thomas Bonfield noted that Duncan several times told Huerta to stop moving
around in the back of the police car and that he had intended to perform a more
extensive search once they were at the police station.
As a result of Huerta’s case,
Lopez said, all sworn officers have been required to complete a two-hour update
course on conducting searches, and police officers who train recruits have been
told to emphasize proper search techniques.
“We're going to do things in a
different way, in a better way, and a lot of it comes from learning from our
experiences,” Lopez said Monday afternoon.
Another change – stemming from
a second policy violation by Duncan – involves the use of in-car video cameras.
They will now turn on automatically within 30 seconds after a vehicle's engine
starts running.
Lopez said Duncan did not
restart the camera, which turns off if the car is idle for more than 50
minutes. Duncan’s interaction with Huerta was not recorded.
The Durham Police Department
will now start providing the city manager a report about any officer-involved
shooting within five business days. After Huerta’s death, there were protests
in Durham from people wanting to know what happened.
Lopez said he thinks the
five-day report will help with community unrest, putting as much information
out in public as quickly as possible.
“I think, like anything else in
this organization, it's a learning process,” Lopez said. “In the future – not
to say we’re going to be perfect – but we’re hopeful not to make the same
mistakes.”
The Huerta case was one of
three officer-involved shootings in the report to Bonfield.
In the two other cases – the
July 27, 2013, death of Jose Adan Cruz Ocampo and the Sept. 17, 2013, death of
Derek Deandre Walker – internal investigations found no violations of police
department policies or procedures.
Officer R.S. Mbuthia shot
Ocampo, 33, after he and other officers responding to a stabbing call told him
to drop a kitchen knife he had been holding. Witnesses later said Ocampo was
trying to hand the knife to an officer when he was shot four times.
Walker, 26, was fatally shot by
Cpl. R.C. Swartz when Walker pointed a gun at officers after an hour-long
standoff at CCB Plaza in downtown Durham. Walker was distraught over losing
custody of his son, relatives said.
