By
Tom Jackman, Washington Post.
Sixteen
months after a Fairfax County police officer shot and killed a Springfield man,
officials for the first time Monday identified the officer as Adam D. Torres,
and made a new claim that the man had a loaded gun nearby and threatened to use
it.
The
longtime partner of John B. Geer, 46, had called police on Aug. 29, 2013, after
she told him she was leaving him and he responded by throwing her belongings
out of their house. In a statement released Monday, police said they were told
Geer not only had “multiple firearms” inside the townhouse but also that he was
“displaying a firearm that he threatened to use against the police.” That
statement contradicts previous witness accounts that Geer was unarmed when he
was shot.
The
attorney for Geer’s family, Michael Lieberman, strongly disputed the claim that
Geer displayed a gun and threatened to use it. “I’ve never heard of him
displaying any firearm at the police and I have no reason to believe he did,”
Lieberman said. Don Geer, John Geer’s father, said he was told by police that
his son was unarmed when he was shot.
Fairfax
police declined to answer any questions about the statement or clarify when
Geer displayed or threatened to use a gun. The handgun found inside the house
was loaded and holstered, the statement said.
Fairfax
officials did not notify Geer’s family or their lawyers that they planned to
release the officer’s name and new details about the case, Lieberman said.
The
statement also said that Geer refused officers’ requests to stay outside and
speak with them, and that “a trained negotiator” tried to resolve the
confrontation. But when Geer began lowering his hands from the top of his storm
door after more than 30 minutes of discussions, “PFC Adam Torres fired a single
shot that struck Geer.”
The
statement said “Geer did not answer the officers’ calls and offers of medical
aid.” Police waited for an hour — and for the arrival of a SWAT team and a
hostage rescue vehicle — before entering Geer’s home, where he was found dead.
Fairfax
said that “a loaded, holstered firearm was recovered on the landing of the
stairs to Geer’s left where he had stood in the doorway and seven more firearms
were recovered inside the home.”
Lieberman
said he had never heard of a negotiator speaking with Geer and that the seven
other guns in the house were in a locked safe.
Police
said Torres is an eight-year veteran of the department and assigned as a patrol
officer to the West Springfield district, but they declined to release his age.
He has been on administrative duties since the shooting.
Torres
could not be immediately located for comment. He has not been involved
previously in any fatal police shootings in Fairfax.
The
investigation of whether Torres should be charged with a crime was handled for
four months by the Fairfax commonwealth’s attorney, who transferred the case in
January 2014 to the U.S. attorney in Alexandria. Federal officials are
considering whether to file civil rights charges in the case, but Fairfax Board
Chairman Sharon Bulova said Monday she had no indication when that might be.
County
officials said they felt the information release was appropriate after a
Fairfax judge in the Geer family’s civil lawsuit against Fairfax last month
ordered a vast amount of pretrial discovery to be released to the family.
Before that, the police had refused to disclose Torres’s name or anything about
him, or any details about why Torres might have shot Geer.
Bulova
said county officials were frustrated by their inability to release
information, but abided by policies that had worked in previous police
shootings: to wait for a ruling on whether a crime was committed before discussing
a case. But she said after 16 months, and the ruling in the civil case by
Fairfax Circuit Court Judge Randy I. Bellows, she met Monday with Fairfax
Police Chief Edwin C. Roessler Jr. and both felt the time was right to release
the information.
Bulova
said the timing was unrelated to a planned protest outside the Fairfax police
headquarters Thursday by a group called Justice for John Geer, which recently
formed to demand information about the shooting.
“This
has just been an unusual situation,” Bulova said. “It was bumped up to the
federal level for, I think, multiple reasons. And we were sort of left in
limbo.”
Bulova
said she did not know when the county’s lawyers would comply with Bellows’s
order to release documents and other evidence to Geer’s family, but she said
Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh did not object to the
release. Bellows gave the county 30 days to provide the information.
Lieberman
also said he did not know how or when he would receive the information. He said
Monday’s statement appeared to be “damage control. To try to show they have
some sense of transparency. A little late, I would say.”
Tom
Jackman is a native of Northern Virginia and has been covering the region for
The Post since 1998.