6 Cleveland police officers fired for actions in 2012 fatal chase
Updated 3:00 PM ET, Tue January 26, 2016
(CNN) Six Cleveland police officers have been fired in connection with a November 2012 car chase that ended with officers firing 137 bullets at a car, killing Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, said Detective Steve Loomis, president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association.
Loomis identified the officers as Wilfredo Diaz, Brian Sabolik, Erin O'Donnell, Michael Farley, Chris Ereg and Michael Brelo.
Brelo, the only officer indicted in the incident, allegedly fired 49 of the shots, including 15 from the hood of the car carrying Russell and Williams. He was acquitted of manslaughter last year.
Loomis, a veteran of 23 years, vowed to get the officers' jobs back. There is "no rhyme or reason" to the dismissals, and he said he and other officers are scratching their heads because the firings seem random, as if names were picked out of a hat.
"This is nothing but politics. I have every confidence in the world we're going to get their jobs back. I'm not going to stand for it," Loomis said.
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MANSFIELD FRAZIER
High-speed police pursuits have been under increasing scrutiny in recent years: according to a 2010 FBI report, someone dies every day as a result of a police pursuit, and the majority of those pursuits begin with a stop for a traffic violation. The same report found that innocent bystanders constitute 42 percent of those killed or injured in police pursuits.
The pursuit of Russell and Williams started near the downtown Justice Center, after an officer radioed that he thought shots had just been fired from Russell’s vehicle. The coroner’s office has yet to complete gunshot-residue tests to determine if either of the victims had recently fired a weapon, but no gun or shell casings were found in the victims' car or along the chase route. (Russell’s brother, David Russell Jr., said in a video interview that he’d recently given Russell the vehicle and that it had a defective muffler that could have caused it to backfire.)
The investigation by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation will initially focus on how the pursuit of Russell and Williams played out. On just-released police tapes, the voice of a male senior officer can be heard saying, “No cars have permission to pursue,”followed by a woman’s voice saying, “Fifth District cars, terminate pursuit.” An officer in the pursuit can be heard responding,“Yeah, but this is our patch and we’re going to see what’s going on.”
A roadside memorial has sprung up near the scene of shooting.
High-speed police pursuits have been under increasing scrutiny in recent years: according to a 2010 FBI report, someone dies every day as a result of a police pursuit, and the majority of those pursuits begin with a stop for a traffic violation. The same report found that innocent bystanders constitute 42 percent of those killed or injured in police pursuits.
The pursuit of Russell and Williams started near the downtown Justice Center, after an officer radioed that he thought shots had just been fired from Russell’s vehicle. The coroner’s office has yet to complete gunshot-residue tests to determine if either of the victims had recently fired a weapon, but no gun or shell casings were found in the victims' car or along the chase route. (Russell’s brother, David Russell Jr., said in a video interview that he’d recently given Russell the vehicle and that it had a defective muffler that could have caused it to backfire.)
The investigation by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation will initially focus on how the pursuit of Russell and Williams played out. On just-released police tapes, the voice of a male senior officer can be heard saying, “No cars have permission to pursue,” followed by a woman’s voice saying, “Fifth District cars, terminate pursuit.” An officer in the pursuit can be heard responding, “Yeah, but this is our patch and we’re going to see what’s going on.”
Under Cleveland police department rules, high-speed pursuits are to be terminated when there exists “sufficient identifying information and high probability of arresting the suspect later.” A dashboard-camera video from one of the vehicles pursuing Russell shows an officer running the plates on the Malibu.
The rules also state that except under special circumstances, no more than two police cruisers are to be involved in a chase. Police union officials are claiming such circumstances existed in this case—specifically, that officers believed they were under fire.
According to a local government official, officers from other jurisdictions were also present at the shooting, but evidently none of them discharged their weapons.
The incident is further complicated by the fact that the victims were both black, and all but one of the officers were white. But Russell also had a history of theft offenses, and on two previous occasions he had fled from police.
Regardless of what happened on that dead-end street, 137 shots is a lot of shots, and like the shootings of Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell, the sheer volume of firepower unleashed on two apparently unarmed people has caused outrage in Cleveland’s minority community. The head of the local NAACP chapter, Hilton Smith, has called for the Department of Justice and the FBI to step into the case.
At a news conference on Dec. 3, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson stated his administration would support the 13 officers, provided they were within “the box”—or departmental rules regarding pursuit and use of deadly force. “But if they went outside the box,” Jackson said, “there will be consequences.”
