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| NEWS > 03 March 2007 |
Other related articles:
Fort Pierce police accused of
FORT PIERCE — Two veteran police officers were suspended without pay over allegations they went to an adult entertainment store while on duty and with an officer in training.
On Thursday, Acting Police Chief Sean Baldwin suspended officers James Ward and Dwight Toombs for two days in mid- January for spending more than an hour in the Cosmic Kiss on Okeechobee Road.
"This gives them a chance to correct a serious misjudgment," Baldwin said.
First-year Officer William Christmas, who was training with Ward, was fired for failing to meet probationary requirements.
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Kansas City Star - MO,USA
03 March 2007
This article appeared in the above title/site.
To view it in its entirity click this link.
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Macomb County Sheriff's Office
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Police defend letting husband
Before Macomb County deputies began Friday night's search of the Grant family's Washington Township, Mich., home, they stopped Stephen Grant and detained him briefly. It was standard protocol for executing a search warrant, assuring that the investigators could begin their work without interruption or any last-minute alterations to the site.
But then authorities let Grant leave, before the grisly discovery of a woman's torso in the home's garage, three weeks after Grant's wife, Tara Lynn Grant, went missing. By the time of the find, however, the 37-year-old father of two had disappeared, apparently driving off in a friend's Dodge Dakota after walking his dog.
"We went in there looking for information leading to her whereabouts," Macomb County Sheriff Mark Hackel said Saturday. "We never thought we'd find what we found."
Hackel said officers were keeping an eye on Grant but backed off when a TV truck arrived. He said authorities feared Grant's attorney would accuse them of harassment. By the time the torso was found, Grant was gone and a door-to-door search turned up empty.
While some experts suggested the sheriff's office could have kept closer tabs on Grant during the search, Hackel bristled at any second-guessing.
"I'm not going to listen to Monday-morning quarterbacking," Hackel said. "The bottom line is that we followed our legal advice from the prosecutor's office."
After sheriff's officials got a search warrant signed by Magistrate Richard McLean, deputies stopped Grant about a mile from his home Friday afternoon. Officers placed him in the back of a squad car for about 20 minutes before letting him get into his Jeep. But before he did, authorities said, he gave them his house key.
With squad cars following him, Grant drove to his home, where several law enforcement officials who were searching it greeted him. TV footage showed him walking his dog in the neighborhood at some point after that. Then he was gone.
"We could not detain him any longer than it took us to get into that home," Hackel said. "It was up to him, according to the law. If he wanted to stay, he could have stayed. He did not. . . . A short time later we made a discovery, and that's obviously the time we went looking for him and we could not find him."
Macomb County Prosecutor Eric Smith acknowledged Saturday that his office advised Hackel that he couldn't detain Grant without an arrest warrant. But, Smith said, the decision whether to put someone under surveillance is not a question for the prosecutor's office to decide.
Detroit attorney Ben Gonek, who has represented litigants with lawsuits against various police agencies, said there is no law preventing police from keeping an eye on someone.
"Not surveilling him or keeping a tab on him was absolutely idiotic," Gonek said. "It's true that they may not have been able to keep him in custody, depending on the wording of the warrant, but one would assume they would have someone in charge of watching him."
James Halushka, a former Oakland County assistant prosecutor, argued that it's unfair to second-guess Hackel, given Grant's past behavior and his many media interviews in which he claimed innocence.
"He hadn't been hiding; he had been talking to the media on a regular basis," said Halushka, who now is employed by Flagstar Bank to protect it from money laundering and terrorist financing. "I'm sure if they had any inkling they were going to find a body in the house, they would have kept him under surveillance."
Halushka said there's no such thing as a surveillance law, but lawyers sometimes argue that surveillance can constitute police harassment.
Grant already had made several claims that Hackel's office was targeting him and that investigators even told him he was their No. 1 suspect, an accusation Hackel has pointedly denied.
"I don't think they had any reason to believe he was going to flee," Halushka said . "The Macomb County Sheriff's Office is a very professional organization."
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