Former Norfolk sheriff’s deputies, fired after teen’s suicide, promptly hired in Portsmouth

By Jonathan Edwards | The Virginian-Pilot | March 27, 2018 3:01 PM

NORFOLK

At least two Norfolk sheriff’s deputies fired last month after a 17-year-old committed suicide in a courthouse holding cell have been hired by the Portsmouth sheriff.

Deputies Kevin Griffin and Harvey Richardson said they were fired Feb. 9 at the end of a three-month investigation into 17-year-old Katrell Washington’s death in a Norfolk courthouse holding cell on Nov. 16.

Griffin and Richardson said they filed grievances appealing their termination, but Norfolk Sheriff Joe Baron stood by the decision. Both ultimately resigned. A third deputy, Sgt. Sharnika Johnson, also resigned in February, according to Norfolk Sheriff’s Office records.

The three – all 15-year veterans – quickly found jobs at the Portsmouth Sheriff’s Office. Griffin and Richardson were hired Feb. 26, according to an employee database. Johnson was hired March 12.

Griffin and Richardson, who spoke with The Pilot before they were hired in Portsmouth, would not say why they were fired. Baron won’t either, so the public has no idea what they did or didn’t do that warranted getting axed.

A law professor who has studied police accountability criticized Baron’s response, saying the sheriff is an elected official who owes the public an explanation of what happened. Baron’s agency was responsible for a 17-year-old who died in custody, University of Pittsburgh law professor David Harris said.

“It just isn’t good enough to say, “Trust us. We got this,” Harris said. “It makes the public feel very cynical.”

Portsmouth Sheriff Michael Moore knew the deputies had left Norfolk because of the investigation into Washington’s death, but not what specific policies they broke, Lt. Col. Marvin Waters said.

Waters said Griffin, Richardson and Johnson all passed background checks. Moreover, he said several people from the “city of Norfolk” highly recommended the deputies. Waters declined to say who they were or whether they worked for the Sheriff’s Office, the court system or the city itself.

He said he isn’t worried about their involvement in Washington’s death.

“From what we had gathered, they were pretty good employees,” Waters said. “I don’t think we’re going to have too many issues.”

A fourth Norfolk deputy who left after Washington’s death also applied to the Portsmouth Sheriff’s Office but was not hired, Waters said.

Waters said Moore would not comment.

The deputies may have been good employees for the most part, but they presumably did something to get fired, Harris said. And now they’re at a neighboring law enforcement agency.

“They weren’t good enough for that department, but they’re good enough for this department? You can’t help but be suspicious because you don’t have all the information.”

On Nov. 16, two attorneys discovered Washington unconscious in his holding cell at the Norfolk courthouse, where he was awaiting a motions hearing on charges that he threatened a Maury High School teacher and stabbed two students who tried to protect her.

Paramedics took the teen to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, where he died the next day.

Washington committed suicide by strangling himself, the medical examiner determined.

Norfolk Police Department homicide detectives investigated Washington’s death. They determined no one committed a crime and nothing deputies did caused his death, Norfolk sheriff’s spokeswoman Karen Pinkston said in a Feb. 9 news release. Investigators with the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner also concluded nothing deputies did led to the boy’s death.

But Sheriff’s Office employees were disciplined for violating the agency’s policies and procedures, Pinkston said in announcing the end of the internal investigation into Washington’s death.

Baron has refused to specify how or how many of his employees were disciplined, except by saying in the February news release that “appropriate disciplinary actions have been taken to hold them accountable for those deficiencies.” Baron also wouldn’t say which policies they broke, because doing so would identify them to former Sheriff’s Office colleagues, he said.

Investigations by police detectives and the medical examiner determined deputies’ actions didn’t lead to Washington’s death, and that should be enough information for people, Baron said in an interview.

“The public does not have the right to scrutinize” sheriff’s employees for breaking department policies, he added.

Baron said his investigators discovered the violations while digging in to what happened, but those violations didn’t have anything to do with the teen’s death. He compared the deputies’ wrongdoing to being caught smoking on duty while investigators were probing something more serious.

Harris, the law school professor, said firing a law enforcement officer is a serious thing. Police chiefs and sheriffs have options when meting out discipline: suspension, retraining, putting a letter in an officer’s file. Firing someone is reserved for the most serious offenses.

“You’ve got to wonder, ‘What did they do to get canned?'” Harris said.

Maybe it was something minor; maybe they’re being scapegoated or were too harshly punished for some other reason, he added.

“It’s perfectly possible that what they did…wasn’t so bad, but as things are we’ll never know,” he said. “But we’ll be suspicious because we know it takes a lot to get canned.”

The sheriff’s staff lawyer, Jennifer Worden, said Baron wouldn’t release the final report on Washington’s death. The sheriff could make the information public if he wanted to, but state law allows him to keep certain information secret, including records of inmates and administrative investigations into possible wrongdoing by law enforcement officers.

“It may be legal to keep that information from the public, but law enforcement needs public support,” Harris said. “If you want the support of the public, you’ve got to talk to them.”

Courthouse video cameras caught Washington’s death on camera, lawyer Beth Ufkes said in court documents on behalf of Washington’s mother.

A day after Washington died, Circuit Judge Jerrauld Jones ordered the Sheriff’s Office and police department to destroy all copies of the video once they completed their investigations. After Ufkes filed a motion, Jones on Dec. 4 ordered Baron to preserve the video in case it’s needed in a future lawsuit.

No lawsuit has been filed.

Baron is the keeper of that video and gets to decide whether to release it to the public. The video, like the report into Washington’s death, is both a record of an inmate and part of an administrative investigation into alleged wrongdoing by an employee of a law enforcement agency, Worden said.

Therefore, she added, she and Baron can choose whether to release it. They chose not to.

That choice, Harris said, erodes the public’s trust.

Jonathan Edwards, 757-598-3453, jonathan.edwards@pilotonline.com

See Original Article Here.