The Fairfax County Police shot and
killed an unarmed citizen in public.
It’s been 22 months; almost two
years AND NO ONE HAS BEEN ARRESTED…….
What would happen to you if you
shot and killed a cop?
Think the cops would nothing
about it for 22 months?
You think the state prosecutor, Morrogh,
the best friend the Fairfax County Police ever had, would call in a grand jury
to decide if you should be arrested?
This is how it works….bear in
mind the Fairfax County Police have already settled the Geer case out of court….
when a prosecutor has a case he needs drag out to buy someone time or that that
the prosecutor wants to lose, (or in this case not indict) the prosecutor calls
in a grand jury and spoon feeds with the information HE wants the grand jury to
hear.
When the case goes into the
crapper, the prosecutor blames it on the grand jury.
IT’S OUR
GOVERNMENT, NOT THEIRS. ALMOST 90% OF THE FAIRFAX COUNTY COPS LIVE OUTSIDE
FAIRFAX COUNTY. TAKE BACK YOUR COUNTY FROM THE COPS AND FIRE THE PEOPLE WHO
HIRE THE COPS
Fairfax prosecutor to convene special grand jury in
John Geer police slaying
By Tom
Jackman April 22
The
Fairfax County prosecutor said Wednesday that he will convene a special grand
jury to hear evidence, and possibly return an indictment, in the police killing
of an unarmed Springfield man in August 2013.
Commonwealth’s
Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh said he had asked the Fairfax Circuit Court to
impanel the grand jury with the hope of reaching a decision by the end of the
summer in the shooting of John Geer.
Geer, 46,
was unarmed when he was shot once in the doorway of his Springfield home by
Officer Adam D. Torres, police records show. Torres told investigators that
Geer, who had shown police a holstered handgun earlier and placed it at his
feet, had made a quick movement to his waist as though he might be reaching for
another gun. But three officers nearby, as well as another officer and two
civilians a short distance away, all said Geer had his hands near his head and
wasn’t reaching toward his waist when he was shot.
On
Tuesday, the county agreed to resolve the Geer family’s ¬wrongful-death civil
suit and pay Geer’s two teenage daughters $2.95 million. But no ruling has been
made, by state or federal prosecutors, on whether Torres should be charged with
a crime.
Morrogh
said that the timing of his announcement was unrelated to the civil settlement
and that he requested the grand jury last week.
“We’ve
developed evidence sufficient to lead me to believe that it’s appropriate for
the citizens of the county to hear the evidence and decide where the case goes
from here,” Morrogh said Wednesday. Unlike standard Fairfax grand juries, which
meet monthly and review numerous cases, special grand juries are convened to
hear only one case.
Torres,
32, and his attorney, John Carroll, did not return messages seeking comment
Wednesday.
Michael
Lieberman, the attorney for the Geer family, said: “I believe it is appropriate
that the shooting death of John is finally being brought before a grand jury,
where citizens of Fairfax County can make a decision regarding Officer Torres’s
actions.”
Fairfax
Police Chief Edwin C. Roessler Jr. issued a statement that his department “is
supportive of the decision by the Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney, and
this step to bring the case to a resolution.” Sharon Bulova, chairman of the
Fairfax Board of Supervisors, said it was “a very welcome development on the
part of the Commonwealth Attorney’s office that will, hopefully, bring this
case closer to a resolution.”
The Geer
case has been marked by the unusually long time prosecutors are taking to
decide whether to charge Torres. After Fairfax homicide detectives investigated
the Aug. 29, 2013, shooting and presented the case to Morrogh, the prosecutor
asked to see Torres’s prior internal-affairs files. Roessler refused the
request, so Morrogh referred the case to the Justice Department in January
2014. The Justice Department has not made a decision on whether to file
charges, records show, and a spokesman with the agency declined to comment
Wednesday.
In
February, Justice officials said in a letter to Sen. Charles E. Grassley
(R-Iowa) that they did not object to Morrogh pursuing a parallel investigation.
By then, Morrogh had obtained the internal-affairs files after they were
ordered released to Geer’s family in the civil suit.
“Given the
tortured history of the case,” Morrogh said, “I want to put witnesses under
oath and get their testimony, and I want that done in front of citizens and
have citizens ask their own questions. And at the end of the day, we’ll get to
the right outcome. . . . I feel bad for the [Geer] family because it’s
taken so long.”
Morrogh
said he had only recently begun to review the Torres internal-affairs files,
after first sending them to another prosecutor, Fauquier County Commonwealth’s
Attorney James P. Fisher, to remove any statements that Torres was required to
make to his employer which violated his right against self-incrimination.
After an
initial review of Fisher’s work, Morrogh said, he received more records from
Fisher on Wednesday that “contained information which should have been turned
over to me long ago.” He said that the information would require more
investigation.
Fairfax
prosecutors typically do not use special grand juries, but one was convened in
2013 when a road-rage incident ended with a man dead after a confrontation in a
mall parking lot in Fairfax City.
Morrogh
said he expected that the Geer grand jury would hear evidence for about a week.
John Geer’s family still reeling, waiting for
decision 20 months after shooting
By Tom
Jackman May 1
Though
one stage of the John Geer case ended last week, with the settlement of the
family’s civil suit against the Fairfax County police for an officer’s fatal
shooting of Geer in 2013, the family still suffers as it waits for a decision
on whether the officer will be charged, 20 months later.
Geer, 46,
was shot by Officer Adam D. Torres as he stood unarmed in the doorway of the
Springfield townhouse he lived in for 24 years with his longtime girlfriend,
Maura Harrington, and where the couple raised their two daughters. Geer and
Harrington were breaking up, and when Geer began throwing Harrington’s
belongings onto the front yard, she summoned police. Torres arrived first,
after an argument with his own wife, police reports show, and fired one shot
into Geer’s chest after claiming that Geer quickly lowered his hands as if
going for a weapon. Four other officers disagreed, the reports show.
It took
17 months for those facts to emerge, in the civil suit Harrington filed on
behalf of their daughters, now 18 and 14.
The facts evidently were enough to persuade Fairfax County to pay the
girls $2.95 million for the death of their father. But criminal charges, under
consideration by the Justice Department since January 2014 and now being
reviewed again by the Fairfax County prosecutor, are still nowhere in sight.
Meanwhile,
Harrington said, her daughters are still struggling with the sudden loss of
Geer. Geer was a self-employed kitchen
remodeling contractor, which gave him the freedom to attend all the softball
functions of his older daughter, Haylea,
who played both travel and high school softball. In 2014, ten months after her
father’s death, Haylea helped lead South County to the school’s first state
championship in any sport. In the fall, she enrolled at West Chester University
in Pennsylvania and joined the varsity softball team there.
But
softball remains a family affair for the other girls, Maura Harrington said,
with West Chester parents attending team parties and games. It hurt too much
for Haylea, her mother said. “It was something she and her dad had, he would’ve
gone to every scrimmage,” Harrington said. “It wasn’t fun anymore. The other
girls all had family.” And so Haylea has quit her college team.
Geer and
Harrington’s other daughter, Morgan, is now 14. “She hasn’t talked to anybody
yet,” Harrington said. “She doesn’t want to talk about it.” One of the factors
in settling the case was that Harrington did not want to put her daughters
through the legal process of depositions and court filings and years of legal
battles with Fairfax County.
“Looking
back at what happened with Sal Culosi’s family,” Harrington said, referring to
the five years it took to resolve the civil suit filed after a Fairfax officer
shot and killed Culosi in 2006, “and the pain of that litigation, I just
couldn’t do that to my girls.”
Harrington
said she didn’t file the suit for money, though “we didn’t have the means to
pay for college without John.” She said she was pleased that Fairfax had formed
a commission to review police policies after the shooting, and grateful that a
“Justice for John Geer” group was formed by people who didn’t know her or Geer.
But “I
don’t understand what the delay is” in deciding whether or not to charge
Torres, who remains on the police force, on administrative duty, while waiting
for a ruling. “From everything I’ve read, good grief,” Harrington said, “it
looks cut and dried to me, and to everybody else. Even the other police
officers say he didn’t deserve to die.” She also didn’t understand why Geer’s
case had flown under the radar for so long. “With everything going on today”
concerning police-related deaths, “it should be national news.”
The
settlement of the civil case, before a criminal ruling has even been made, was
highly unusual and seemed spurred by two developments: the orders by Fairfax
Circuit Court Judge Randy I. Bellows that the county first release its criminal
investigative file to Harrington’s lawyers, which happened in January, and then
the order that the county release its internal affairs files, which happened in
February. The contents of the internal affairs files, now also provided to
Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh, have not been made public.
But within two months of that release, and with a new amended lawsuit scheduled
to be filed naming Torres, the county settled.
In the
past, in Culosi and many other police-related cases, Fairfax’s county attorneys
have played hardball. Why not this time? Board Chairman Sharon Bulova (D)
explained this week, “I supported settling the Geer case because it was the
right thing to do. The Geer family wished to settle so that the daughters will
be able to go to college. Our board was
glad to be able to put to rest the pending civil lawsuit. It was a mutually agreeable outcome.”
Supervisor
Pat Herrity (R-Springfield), who has been the most vocal supervisor on pushing
the case forward, said settling the case was “the only responsible decision to
make.” Why? “The public can read the 11,000 pages and come to their own
conclusion as to whether we should have settled.”
Herrity
also noted that “what bothers me is that we as a board haven’t had a public
discussion on this,” meaning the government’s response to high-profile public
safety cases. The Fairfax board’s public safety committee has not met in two
years. “We just raised our salaries but we can’t find time on the calendar to
talk about public safety,” Herrity said. “That’s a sad state of affairs.” He
said there may be a public safety committee meeting in June.
Morrogh
said last week that he would seek to present the case to a special grand jury,
but probably not until this summer. U.S. Attorney Dana Boente in Alexandria has
given no indication when or if the Justice Department will ever rule on federal
charges. Geer’s family, including his parents, who have like Harrington
remained mostly quiet publicly since August 2013, are still watching and
waiting.
“As far
as I’m concerned, until charges are pressed with Torres, it won’t be a
closure,” Geer’s father, Don Geer, told the Connection Newspapers on the day of
the settlement. “Fairfax has still done nothing as far as he’s concerned. He’s
still on the daggone payroll. I’m paying his salary. That’s really quite
disgusting.”
