“It is easier to commit murder than to justify
it.” Aemilius Papinianus
The
entire affair still smells bad. In
January of 2006, the Fairfax County Police SWAT team shot and killed an unarmed
optometrist named Salvatore Culosi while they were arresting him for suspicion
of sports gambling.
A
Fairfax County detective said overheard Culosi wagering on a college football
game at a bar. That in itself seems strangely coincidental. The cop said he then befriended Culosi.
During the next several months he talked Culosi into raising the stakes on
friendly wagers. The cop pushed the betting up to one single bet of $2,000 in a
single day, enough to charge him with running a gambling operation.
On
January 24, 2006, the cop called Culosi and arranged a time to come by his
house and collect his winnings. A few hours later, a barefoot Culosi stepped
out of his house to meet the cop and was shot dead.
The
cop who killed Culosi, a 17 year veteran of being on the public payroll and
trained at taxpayers’ expense in firearms and tactics, said that when he jumped
from his car, the car door bounced back, striking him in the side and causing
him to pull the trigger.
Let
me repeat that. The cop who killed Culosi, a 17 year veteran of being on the
public payroll and trained at taxpayers’ expense in firearms and tactics, said
that when he jumped from his car, the car door bounced back, striking him in
the side and causing him to pull the trigger.
The
shot went directly through Culosi's heart. So what the police wanted the public
to believe, and the story that they still abide by, was that the cops fired a
shot by mistake that went directly through the victim’s heart. Vegas wouldn’t
cover those odd.
The
killing may have been unintentional but it was certainly negligent. There was
absolutely no reason the cop should have had his hand on the guns trigger or
had the weapon pointed at Culosi.
However
there are some who question whether the shooting was in fact unintentional at
all. The cops were placing bets with
Culosi that much was certain but for how long? And how many cops were placing
bets with him? How much did they owe him?
But
why the cops used a SWAT team to arrest a gambler they we replacing bets with
is still unknown. Culosi, who had no criminal record; had never owned a
firearm; and presented no threat of violence, flight, or resisting arrest.
At
the hospital, the cops stopped a nurse from notifying Culosi’s parents that
they had killed their son. Instead the cops waited for five hours before
calling the family to tell them that they had shot their son dead over a highly
suspicious gambling arrest.
The
cops finally admitted that using a SWAT team to arrest a suspected sports
gambler was unnecessary and that they could have used "lower-risk, less
complex arrest techniques”. To which the
entire nation replied “Well duh”
In
the months that followed, the detective who set Culosi badgered Culosi's
friends and family. He took their names and numbers from the dead man’s cell
phone and computer.
Culosi's
brother-in-law, told The Washington Post
that the cop called him and menacingly asked, "How much are you
into Sal for?"
A
lifelong friend of Culosi's, said that the cop called him and accused him of
being a gambler. The calls, Gulley told the paper, smacked of intimidation
aimed at discouraging a lawsuit.
Arrogant
and angry at being questioned in a county they virtually own, the Fairfax
County police department is notorious for declining virtually every request for
information from the media and anyone else. It took the police one year to
release its investigation results to Culosi's family. And that was done only after legal action was
taken to make them provide the information to the family.
With
the eyes of the world on them, the police said it would “conduct a review of
policies and procedures involving” the use of SWAT teams in making arrest. If they made the review, which is doubtful,
they never made it public.
The
killer cops name was released to the public only because the The Washington
Post's Tom Jackman reported it based on a tip from a confidential source.
The
Culosi family suspected that the cop mistook the cell phone Culosi had in his
hand for a pistol and shot the young man dead.
The family hired their own investigators to exam the case. He concluded
that based on the police department's own measurements of the crime scene, when
the cop pulled the trigger he was away from his vehicle and much closer to
Culosi than he had claimed.
Worse
for the cop, by using the recorded locations of shell casings, police vehicles,
and Culosi's body, the detectives produced computer animations showing that the
incident could not have happened the way Rohrer said it. And yet Rohrer was never disciplined.
The
cop who shot him was demoted from the SWAT team and suspended without pay for
three weeks. As lenient as the punishment was, the police union objected. They
felt the punishment was going overboard. The union said that the punishment
"may be politically motivated because of all the media attention" and
that the suspension was "way off the charts" and that an oral or
written reprimand would have been more appropriate
Robert F. Horan Jr., the chief prosecutor and
the best friend the Fairfax County Police ever had, declined to prosecute the cop or refer the
case to a grand jury.
Two
months after the cops gunned down the unarmed Culosi, the police issued a press release warning the
people of Fairfax County not to gamble.
The
county paid Culosi's family $2 million to settle a civil lawsuit. The cop who shot him and the cop who
tormented the family afterwards paid nothing. The taxpayers picked up the
bill. Not a single penny was taken from
the police department’s enormous budget.
Nothing happened to them. Nothing changed.