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.”
