Whipped Cream Difficulties

Around this time last year, we noted the police officer in Franklin County, VA, who shot his ex-wife and engaged in a wild police chase that screwed up traffic for miles.

Well, the former sheriff – the one who allegedly ignored warnings that his deputy was hunting his ex-wife – the one who allegedly told dispatchers not to put out a BOLO – has been charged with “misconduct by an elected official”. This is a “class 1” misdemeanor charge, so it isn’t like he’s going to do hard time, but..

…he’s also being sued by the dead woman’s family. And by two former deputies who were fired after an investigation in 2009 that led to charges against the sheriff of “failure to maintain adequate records”. (Those charges were dismissed.) And by another woman who claims the sheriff didn’t act on threats to kill her son until it was too late.

(This comes by way of the Cato Institute’s new “National Police Misconduct Reporting Project” which in turn is an outgrowth of work done by David Packman.)

On February 9th of this year, Officer Daniel Harmon–Wright of the Culpeper, VA police department shot and killed Patricia Cook in the parking lot of a church preschool.

Officer Harmon–Wright was responding to a call about a woman “acting suspiciously”, and claimed that Ms. Cook attempted to flee, rolling up the window in her Jeep and trapping his arm as she did so.

There are questions about Officer Harmon-Wright’s account of events. For example, Ms. Cook’s Jeep did not have power windows, which raises obvious questions about the whole “rolling up her window and trapping his arm” thing. Reason’s “Hit and Run” blog has some good coverage of the case here.

One point noted by Reason and other reporters is that Officer Harmon-Wright has several names: he’s also gone by “Daniel Wayne Sullivan” and “Dan Wayne”.

On Tuesday, Officer Harmon-Wright was charged with “murder, malicious shooting into an occupied vehicle, malicious shooting into an occupied vehicle resulting in a death and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony” by a grand jury.

This is interesting enough, but there’s another aspect to the story that I think is worth noting: Officer Harmon-Wright’s mother, who was “an administrative secretary to the chief of police” when he was hired as a police officer, has been charged with three counts of “uttering” and three counts of “forgery of public documents”. Apparently, the grand jury turned up evidence that she had altered public records to remove “negative information” from Officer Harmon-Wright’s personnel file.

Some folks go “wow” at $320 million dollar incinerators, and I can’t blame them for that. Other folks go “wow” when they’re faced with how deep the corruption seems to run sometimes.

(Hattip: Commendante Balko.)