http://www.statter911.com/
Dave Statter
What does it say when a pair of
teenagers are able to release a statement on an enormously emotional and
personal subject, yet the chief of police for Fairfax County, Virginia blows it
twice when responding to the very same issue?
You can’t help but admire the two
daughters of John Geer, the man who was shot to death by a Fairfax County
police officer in August, 2013. Haylea, 19, and Morgan, 15, suffered the
killing of their father and were victims of the Fairfax County Government, yet,
at a key moment in the case on Monday, they were able to bring some honesty and
compassion to this awful mess.
Haylea and Morgan with their dad on Father’s
Day 2012
Previously: Police chief tries to
put cover-up behind him by shamefully rewriting history
You may recall that the
leadership in Fairfax County withheld important information about the Geer case
from local and federal prosecutors, a United States senator, the public and,
most importantly, John Geer’s family. For 17-months, there was mostly silence
about the case from Colonel Edwin Roessler Jr., the chief of the Fairfax County
Police Department. It took a lawsuit by Geer’s survivors to force Roessler and
company to do what they should have done from the start — tell the truth about
what happened.
In early 2015, when a judge
finally ordered Fairfax County to come clean, we all learned it was a bad
shooting. That information came from the investigative files that included the
accounts of the officers who witnessed what occurred. On Monday, the former
officer who fired the fatal shot, Adam Torres, entered a guilty plea to
involuntary manslaughter.
Faced with this latest news about
the man who killed their dad, Haylea and Morgan responded in a way that is
remarkable, especially when you consider the torment Fairfax County inflicted
upon these teenagers and the rest of John Geer’s survivors. Geer’s children
asked for justice and mercy. Here’s an excerpt from their statement:
It would be easier to give in to
our personal feelings and cry out for Torres to be further punished; we are a
society of laws, and there can be no doubt that we are entitled to use this
trial as an outlet for our pain, to express our fury that our father was taken
from us. However, we are called and
reminded by that pain to avoid inflicting the same upon other children just to
satisfy our emotions. It is rare that the easy choice is the right choice, and
while we’ve lost our father, we must strive for both justice and mercy. Where
Torres failed to show prudence and mercy, we will show him and his family both.
On the same day that this
statement was released, Colonel Roessler issued an enormously self-serving
statement that included one of the biggest lies we’ve heard throughout this
2-year and 8-month cover-up. Roessler said, “The men and women of the Fairfax
County Police Department have fully cooperated with authorities during this
investigation.”
When challenged on this
unbelievably callous and false statement, Roessler tried to clarify what he
meant during a conversation with The Washington Post’s Tom Jackman (Jackman’s
article also includes a detailed accounting of the cover-up that occurred in
the Geer case):
“The men and women told the
absolute truth,” Roessler said, “there’s over 11,000 pages which show that.
There’s no blue wall of silence. That’s what I want the community to know.
There was legal advice given [on the internal affairs files], I’ve put
processes in place to deal with that.
Here was the perfect moment for
someone to finally be publicly accountable for the cover-up and obstruction of
justice that occurred — a despicable conspiracy of silence that directly
impacted the lives of these two young women. But the chief of police or anyone
else in charge in Fairfax County couldn’t summon anything resembling the
courage, compassion and humanity that was shown Monday by Haylea and Morgan.
Colonel Edwin Roessler Jr., chief of the
Fairfax County Police Department
Instead, Ed Roessler tried to
make the ridiculous case that the advice of a county attorney trumped the oath
of office he took when he became a police officer and took again when he became
the chief. But let’s not put this all on the chief’s shoulders. The best we can
tell is that each of Roessler’s bosses — inside the county executive’s office
and on up to Chairman of the Board of Supervisors Sharon Bulova — had a hand in
some of the various decisions that furthered the cover-up.
Each one of them should have
long-ago issued an apology to the citizens for their lack of leadership,
transparency and candor. They should have also apologized to the men and women
of the Fairfax County Police Department for tarnishing their reputation by
failing to live up to the same high standards displayed by the officers who
witnessed and investigated the Geer case. If there was actual accountability in
Fairfax County, all of the “leaders” who contributed to the cover-up would have
departed their positions early last year when we finally learned the truth they
were hiding.
Most important, Roessler should
have had the decency to issue a statement Monday that was as honest and
heartfelt as the one issued by these two young women. But to do that would mean
a public apology from the chief of police for failing to do his duty as a
police officer. It would mean someone in Fairfax County admitting they withheld
the truth about the death of Haylea and Morgan’s dad and greatly delayed
justice being served.
But John Geer’s daughters had
enough experience with Fairfax County to know that such an honest public
accounting wasn’t coming from Roessler or anyone else. Even though their
statement showed mercy for the man who killed their dad, these thoughtful
teenagers weren’t as charitable to the people responsible for the cover-up.
They made that extremely clear in the final paragraph of their statement:
As for the Fairfax County Board
of Supervisors and the Fairfax County Police Department, we remain appalled by
their actions in covering up the truth and putting Torres in the position to
decide life and death given what they knew about his background. Until such
time that the Ad Hoc Committee’s recommendations are adopted and the policies
of the FCPD are changed, we fear that these tragic events can occur again with
different victims and different officers.
We call upon the Board to immediately adopt and implement the Committee’s
recommendations without delay for the good of the FCPD and the citizens of
Fairfax County. No family should have to suffer the loss of a mother, a father,
or a loved one under circumstances like ours.
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