In
November of 2009 a bipolar man named David Masters, an unarmed motorist, was
shot dead by the cops as he sat in the driver’s seat of his car. Masters was wanted for allegedly stealing
some flowers from a planter. But in
Fairfax County, even stealing flowers from a planter can get you killed by the
cops.
Masters
was a former Army Green Beret and the son of a retired U.S. Army colonel. He had long suffered from bipolar
disorder. He also had a massive heart
attack in 2007 and had a pacemaker installed.
The
police refused to release the name of the shooter and the Board of Supervisor
said and did nothing about that. The cops
told, they didn’t ask, they told the Board of Supervisors that there would be
no public hearing to determine whether there was any wrongdoing. And, the cops told the Board of Supervisors,
that reporters would have almost no access to any information surrounding the
incident of any kind.
Almost
needless to say, Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond Morrogh
announced that he would not be filing any charges against the officer who shot
Masters.
Morrogh
found that the shooting was justified due to that gosh darned “furtive gesture”
thing again. But the only eyewitness to
the furtive gesture was the cop who shot the man dead. There was dash-cam video of the shooting, or
maybe there was, (Although the cop denied it, there is dash-cam video of Masters’
shooting.)
The
public will never know.
"Unfortunately, we had a mentally ill man who was behaving
bizarrely”, Morrogh said. "His
family indicated he was behaving under delusions, that he might feel he was
under attack if approached by the police.
I think that's the explanation for his actions."
Michael
Pope, a reporter who covers Northern Virginia for the Connection Newspapers
chain and for the Washington, D.C., NPR affiliate WAMU, filed a series of open
records requests with the Fairfax Police Department related to the Masters
shooting. All were denied.
Then he asked Fairfax County Police Public
Information Officer Mary Ann Jennings why her department won't at least release
the incident report on Master's death, given concerns raised about the
shooting. "Let us hear that
concern”, Jennings shot back. "We
are not hearing it from anybody except the media, except individual
reporters."
Jennings
also told Pope that releasing police reports to the press would have a
"chilling effect" on victims and witnesses coming forward to report
crimes.
Next
Pope asked Jennings why her department would not release the name of the cop
who shot Masters. "What does the
name of an officer give the public in terms of information and disclosure?” Jennings asked, "I'd be curious to know
why they want the name of an officer”.
It
sounded like a threat against the reporter.
It
looked like another 70 years would go by without a Fairfax County cop being
charged
for an on-duty shooting, but then, due to international attention that the case
drew, the cops finally admitted that masters were not armed. Bad news for the cops came when the FBI
announced that they would be investigation the case. Realizing they were trouble, the cops
reversed a long practice of withholding the names of cops who gun people down
and sold out the cop who shot Masters and released his name to the public.
When
the case drew more and more attention from around the world and a federal civil
rights investigation into the shooting is continuing. The cops realized they were caught red handed
they fired the cop who killed Masters, terminating him under the guise of
improper use of deadly force.
Justice
is open to everyone in the same way as the Ritz Hotel is open to everyone.
Judge Sturgess
December
14, 2006 the cops cornered and shot an unarmed robbery suspect. There was no civilian witness to the
shooting. The man, who was black, was
hiding in a crawl space with no way out when the cops ordered him to come out
of the crawl space. The man refused and
made what police said was "several furtive gestures”, although they
declined to say what those gestures were.
They then fired two shots into the suspect, killing him.