By Antonio Olivo
Fairfax County officials Friday
were preparing to seek bids from private consultants who can recommend changes
in how information is handled in police-involved shootings, the result of a
backlash over the county’s long delay in sharing details behind the John B.
Geer shooting.
County officials will also seek
community input on such cases, said Sharon Bulova, the chair of the board of
supervisors. The process, she said, will likely provoke “hard questions” over
the public’s right to know about fatal police shootings while protecting those
officers’ legal rights.
“I don’t know what the change
would be, I just know there must be places where we can find some examples of
changes we want to make,” said Bulova (D), who consulted with Virginia state
attorney Mark R. Herring (D) over the case on Thursday.
County officials have been in a
period of self-reflection over the 2013 Geer shooting, where police Officer
Adam D. Torres shot an unarmed Geer once in the chest, killing him, during a
confrontation that began as a domestic dispute call outside Geer’s home in
Springfield.
Last week, after refusing to
share details of the shooting for 17 months, the county posted 11,000 pages of
a police investigation on its Web site — some of which contradicted Torres’s
assertion that Geer had been reaching for a gun.
The U.S. Justice Department has
been reviewing the case for more than a year after Commonwealth’s Attorney
Raymond F. Morrogh (D) decided his office couldn’t effectively investigate the
case when Fairfax police refused to turn over some details of the shooting.
Federal prosecutors have yet to decide on whether to file criminal charges
against Torres.
Attorneys for Geer’s family —
which is suing Fairfax police and Chief Edwin C. Roessler Jr. for wrongful
death in Fairfax circuit court — are seeking Torres’s internal-affairs files.
Fairfax Supervisor Jeff McKay
(D-Lee) said the board should have known earlier about the stalemate with
Morrogh’s office, which might have avoided the long delay in sharing details.
The board wasn’t aware the case
would be referred to federal prosecutors until after the fact, McKay said,
though he characterized that outcome as part of routine procedures in dealing
with legal matters.
But, by then, it was locked
into a decision against sharing the case’s details out of worry over
jeopardizing the federal criminal investigation, McKay said.
“We were never given a very
clear indication of what our options are when there is that kind of disagreement
with the commonwealth attorney,” McKay said.
“On a case where someone was
shot and killed, I think you’d want to get the pulse of the board before the
commonwealth attorney kicked [the case] somewhere else,” McKay said. “We were
never given a clear indication of what our options were.”
Antonio covers government,
politics and other regional issues in Fairfax County. He worked in Los Angeles,
New York and Chicago before joining the Post in September of 2013.
