Fairfax County Police Watch: Fairfax supervisors seek movement in John Geer slaying, get no reply from feds

By Tom Jackman

A 13th month has now come and gone in the remarkable saga of the Fairfax County police killing of unarmed citizen John Geer. Still no information has been released about how or why a Fairfax police officer gunned down Geer as he stood in the doorway of his Springfield home in August 2013, or why authorities didn’t render aid to him for an hour. Federal authorities who were handed the case eight months ago, apparently have not been shown any movement in their investigation.

Last month, after Geer’s longtime partner spoke publicly for the first time and filed a lawsuit against the police, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors got together and fired off a letter to U.S. Attorney Dana Boente. It is published for the first time below. In it, the board politely asks the federal prosecutor to please resolve this thing, one way or the other.

The U.S. attorney did not favor the supervisors with a reply, county officials said, and a spokesman for Boente said Tuesday his office still could not comment on the case. Witnesses to the shooting, to include Geer’s father and Geer’s best friend, were interviewed months ago by federal agents and prosecutors, but have not been contacted to testify before a grand jury. There do not appear to be any answers coming any time soon.

“The Board certainly understands your obligation to conduct a thorough review and investigation,” board Chairman Sharon Bulova wrote to Boente, “and by no means does the Board wish for your decision to be hasty or made without consideration of all of the relevant facts and information.” The supervisors, however, “would like to express to you the importance of a resolution of this matter,” Bulova wrote, “as that will go a long way towards allowing our citizens to have faith in the process by which police shooting incidents are investigated.”

Speaking of which, Geer’s father has also written a letter. Don Geer, who watched the officer shoot his son and has now waited in vain to find out who did it and why, has added his voice to those calling for an independent agency to review Fairfax police shootings. His letter is in the second document reader below. The Virginia Citizens Coalition for Police Accountability has been lobbying for this since 2010, several months after the killing of unarmed motorist David Masters on Route 1 by Fairfax Officer David Scott Ziants. The families of Masters and Salvatore Culosi, the unarmed optometrist shot and killed by Officer Deval Bullock in 2006, also support an independent review authority, and their letters follow Don Geer’s letter. The Fairfax supervisors have shown no interest in establishing any independent review provcess.

“We have now spent thirteen frustrating months,” Geer wrote, “trying to acquire information as to who, why, etc. John was killed. So far there appears to be no justice for John. It is obvious that the present methods used by Fairfax County in cases involving a police shooting do not meet the needs of the family or the public.”

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.