A few days after the bizarre shootout and high-speed chase across the island last July 22, Police Chief Buz Dillon sent a report to the City Manager, Mayor and City Commissioners, telling them that a man in the pickup truck the cops were chasing had a gun and fired at officers.
At the time, this revelation seemed to soften the news that three cops had fired at least eight shots in a congested area of Old Town. The man was "holding a gun out the window and firing at officers," Dillon told city management, presumably with a straight face.
Dillon has now admitted, however, that he gave city management bad information about a "man with a gun firing at officers"— and a number of officers involved in the shootout and chase are now the subjects of internal affairs investigations.
At the time, only we here at Key West The Newspaper questioned what seemed to be a transparent attempt to justify unjustified shooting. Here's why we were skeptical:
• The initial police report, compiled on the day after the incident, was quite detailed— but there was no mention of the man in the pickup shooting at officers! We didn't think it was likely that the detective who wrote that report would "forget" to mention something as important as that.
• In addition, Dillon's "man with a gun" story seemed flimsy, at best. For one thing, there was no information about how many shots the man supposedly fired. And when the suspects were finally arrested, the cops couldn't find a gun! Duh!
The explanation: The man may have thrown the gun out the window during the chase— but a search of the chase route yielded "negative results," Dillon told his bosses. And, apparently, once the man was in custody, no one chemically tested his hands to see if he had fired a gun. Double duh!
• Another reason we were skeptical is that Dillon has a history of fibbing. You will recall that, just a few weeks before the shooting/chase incident, he had this writer arrested for publishing information about an embarrassing internal affairs investigation— which, incidentally, subsequently exposed two other fibbing cops. The charges against us were dropped, of course— not only because we didn't violate the obscure law that Dillon had dredged up to get his warrant but, also, because a federal judge had declared the law unconstitutional a decade ago.
Dillon promised Judge Wayne Miller that he would give us a courtesy call to tell us about the warrant. He didn't. He fibbed to the judge. He also told the Miami Herald that he did call us. He didn't. He fibbed to the Miami Herald.
So why would it be surprising that he might fib to his bosses to try to justify why his officers went on a shooting spree in busy Old Town?
Our skepticism has been validated. This week, we were able to review the State Attorney's charges against the man and woman at the center of the shootout/chase incident. Of the 11 counts against them, not one involves shooting at officers.
Charges against the couple include: Grand theft auto, assault with a deadly weapon (the pickup truck) on a law enforcement officer (LOA), resisting an officer with violence, fleeing and eluding a LOA, ans leaving the scene of an accident.
On Wednesday, we sent Buz a memo asking him to explain how he came up with the bogus "man with a gun shooting at cops" story he passed along to the City Manager, Mayor and City Commissioners as truth. At presstime, he had not responded.