Rush To Judgment: New Documents Reveal Who Was Really To Blame For John Geer Fiasco

It seems like every day now, the Washington Post is publishing yet another article on the slow motion disaster surrounding the police shooting death of John Geer by a Fairfax County Police Officer in 2013. Despite the fact that the shooting occurred almost two years ago, absolutely nothing has happened at all.  The officer has not been cleared, but neither has he been charged either.  Now I’ve heard of the wheels of justice turning slowly, but this is ridiculous!

Earlier in the current year, the Post published a series of articles that were often quick to blame the Fairfax County Police Department for allegedly mishandling the investigation of the Officer.  Based on those articles, I offered by own insight into who was to blame, suggesting that, at least on the surface, the head prosecutor of Fairfax and the Department of Justice were more to blame than the police department.  Now however, it looks like the Post has found the true culprit behind the madness, a member of the county attorney’s office.

According to a Washington Post article dated March 5^th,documents released by the Fairfax County Police Department show that Cynthia Tianti, a twenty five year senior member of  the county attorney’s office,  told the Fairfax police to withhold internal affairs files from the head prosecutor Ray Morrogh, thereby preventing him from concluding his investigation.  At the time Morrogh thought it was the police who were obstructing him, and in a sense it was, but the real culprit, at least according to the Post, appears to be the attorney that suggested the course of action to the police. 

To make matters worse, County Board of Supervisors Chairman Sharon Bulova (D) said that the county attorney’s office failed to inform them that Morrogh had requested a meeting with Bulova and the rest of the board to discuss the case.

According to the Post article, Tianti is now on leave, and her boss, the head county attorney David Bobzien, has announced that he plans to retire in June.  It looks like a major shake up of the county attorney’s office is underway. 

My Insight:  I can only guess that the county attorney’s office was trying to mitigate the county’s civil liability in a potential wrongful death case, a course of action that Geer’s family inevitably pursued.  However, how civil liability concerns can trump a criminal investigation by the head prosecutor seems astounding to me.  

Furthermore, why is the county attorney’s office a separate entity from the prosecutor’s office?

I had a conversation with my attorney spouse about this recently.  In the jurisdiction where my wife is from, a county attorney’s office operates under the head prosecutor.  This ensures that a situation like what happened in the Geer case could never happen.  While I’m not sure that this is necessarily the right way to re-organize the county attorney’s office, it is definitely a course of action that the Board of Supervisors should consider. 

The John Geer Shooting and the Consequences Of Delaying Justice

Just a quick update: I did a little more research and found an interesting allegation from a letter to the editor in the Fairfax Times. According to this letter, the Fairfax Police refused to cooperate with our Commonwealth Attorney by refusing to turn over information. In another report by WUSA 9, the internal affairs investigation of Torres didn't even begin until after the civil suit was filed last September. If either of these allegations are true, then that changes everything. The blame would fall squarely on the police, and we need to seriously reform this department.

As any denizen of Fairfax County Virginia could tell you, the normal rule of the street is that the police are right 100% of the time; at least until they are proven wrong months or even years later and at great personal expense to you or your family.

That maxim certainly holds true for the family of John Geer and others who have been trying to find out the truth behind the mysterious police shooting that led to John’s death in 2013. Yes that’s right. John Geer was shot and killed by the police over a year ago, and the officer who shot him was … not indicted by a grand jury, (no wait, that was another story) but wasn’t prosecuted either. Instead, the case has languished in some kind of bureaucratic purgatory. Normally, the Commonwealth Attorney (the head prosecutor) of a given Virginia jurisdiction is supposed to investigate police shootings, and then determine whether they are justified or not. That didn’t happen in this situation though. Our Commonwealth Attorney, Ray Morrogh opted to not investigate the shooting because of an apparent conflict of interest.

What exactly is the conflict of interest you ask? No one knows for certain, but what is known is that the officer involved in the shooting, Officer Torres, apparently had some kind of a shouting match with an assistant prosecutor in a Virginia court room a few months prior to the accident. That sounds pretty weak if you ask me.

So Ray Morrough booted the case up to the Justice Department, and the justice department has sat on the case for the past year in a half or so. Meanwhile, Officer Torres has been on administrative leave the entire time.

Ok, that’s all fine and good for the officer, but what about Geer’s family? Don’t they deserve some answers?

Well it turns out they were in luck. Thanks to an unlawful death suit and a few discovery requests filed by their attorney, a judge recently ordered the Fairfax County Police Department to release literally thousands of documents related to the shooting. The Police didn’t make this an easy thing however. For the past few years, they have released pretty much nothing until the courts intervened.

This has led the Washington Post to allege that the actions’ of the Fairfax County Police have amounted to a cover up that has eroded the public’s trust in the department.

So with all of these jumbled issues out on the table, I’ll attempt to shine some light on this mess.

Was the shooting justified?

Even though the Fairfax County Police Department has released 1000s of documents related to the shooting, I still think it is appropriate to with hold judgment on that one. There appear to be a few conflicting stories involved, but nothing so complex that the normal criminal justice system, or a grand jury couldn’t figure out. Which I think goes to the real problem here.

Why is the investigation taking so long?

Everyone knows the Federal Government takes forever to do anything. That’s just the nature of the beast. So why didn’t Ray Morrogh get a special prosecutor appointed, or get a commonwealth from a neighboring jurisdiction to take the case? That just doesn’t make any sense to me at all. If anyone is to blame here, I’d say DOJ first, and the Fairfax Commonwealth second. There is no conceivable reason an investigation should take over two years to be completed. It is inexcusable. We the people deserve better from our government.

Did the Fairfax Police Engage In A Coverup?

Again, my instinct here is not to rush to judgment on this issue either. The Fairfax Police had a justifiable reason not to release the information. Namely, that a criminal investigation into the shooting had not concluded. However, at some point that argument started to get thin once the investigation started to drag. Now the police have managed to get themselves boxed into a corner as it now appears that the Geer family’s civil suit is the only thing keeping this case from descending into a perpetual quagmire where nothing ever happens, and Torres stays on leave until he retires.

Now whether that premise is true or not is unknown. What is known however is that the wheels of justice appear to either be completely stuck, or are moving at the speed of a glacier.

Let’s hope that all of this recent press gets those wheels turning a little faster.