Firehouse charges ruled out
There is insufficient evidence to charge a Spokane firefighter who had sex with a 16-year-old girl or seek destruction of evidence counts against two police detectives responsible for deleting photos of the firehouse sexual encounter, the county and city prosecutors announced Thursday.
Spokane County Prosecutor Steve Tucker said pursuing criminal charges against former city firefighter Daniel Ross would be a waste of taxpayers’ money because police couldn’t locate the photos.
“I’m not saying that something wrong didn’t happen here, or condone this type of activity,” Tucker said at a news conference. “But we really don’t have enough to prove to a jury of 12 and get a unanimous verdict for guilt on something like this.”
City Prosecutor Howard Delaney said he had concluded, after an independent review by the Asotin County prosecutor, that city Detectives Joe Peterson and Neil Gallion committed no crime in ordering Ross to delete pictures he took while having sex with the teenage girl.
“The review of the reports by the independent prosecutor found absolutely no intent to impair or obstruct the investigation by the investigating officers – hence, no ability to prove tampering with evidence to six jury members from the community,” Delaney said, seated beside Tucker in a Spokane Police Department conference room.
Several hours after the firehouse sex photos were deleted on Feb. 11, the detectives were ordered by Acting Police Chief Jim Nicks to return to the city fire station and seize the camera.
But by then, Tucker disclosed for the first time on Thursday, Ross had replaced the small memory card in his Panasonic digital camera with another one. No one, other than the firefighter, knows at this point what happened to the memory card used to store the digital pictures, including two photos of the disrobed teen wearing the firefighter’s coat, the prosecutor said.
When an attempt was made to recover the photos from the 512 megabyte “SD card” in the camera as part of the reopened investigation, only deleted Ross family Christmas pictures were recovered, leading investigators to conclude it wasn’t the same card used to photograph the sex acts, Deputy Police Chief Bruce Roberts said in response to reporters’ questions.
The deputy chief, who joined Tucker and Delaney for the press conference, said the digital camera’s memory card – not much bigger than a postage stamp – could have been “easily broken, easily concealed, easily destroyed.”
As part of the reopened investigation, detectives interviewed Ross and the victim again, but lacked probable cause to get a search warrant to look for the memory card used to take the photographs, Roberts said.
“We had no idea where it was … or where to look,” Roberts said.
The victim told detectives she believes 20 to 30 pictures, including close-ups of her body, were taken by Ross, according to police reports released late Thursday.
The two engaged in sex acts in the fire station’s furnace room, which was equipped with a black chair and a box of stuffed animals, the reports said.
The girl and Ross met in December on an Internet site, adultfriendfinder.com, where adults or people who claim they are 18 go to look for sex partners.
The firefighter, who exercised his right not to answer questions from police, would answer only certain “negotiated questions” between his attorney, Christian Phelps, and detectives, said the deputy chief who supervised the reopened investigation.
Phelps, interviewed Thursday after the announcement, said neither he nor his client was asked to produce the memory card used to take the pictures, and a search warrant wasn’t obtained by police.
“It’s the right decision,” Phelps said of Tucker’s decision not to charge Ross with a crime.
“They made the right call the first time,” Phelps said.
“Then there was the public outcry, which precipitated the new investigation. It was expensive and time consuming and it diverted resources from other more productive pursuits and stronger cases.
“I can tell you there was a lot of manpower spent on this case on both sides. The conclusions they made initially are the same ones they have now.”
But others expressed lukewarm reactions.
“I respect the prosecutor’s decision if he didn’t have adequate evidence. But it’s unfortunate that the chain of evidence was broken and he couldn’t make the decision based on the actual evidence,” said City Councilwoman Mary Verner, a lawyer and a member of the city’s Public Safety Committee.
Kathryn Harris, a leader in the 150-member Spokane Women’s Coalition, said the acting police chief and Deputy Chief Al Odenthal asked for a meeting after the group criticized the city and police handling of the firehouse sex incident at a press conference on March 8.
At that meeting, the coalition told Nicks and Odenthal their officers should get better sensitivity training on how to deal with victims of sexual assault.
The women were especially upset that the police appeared to be blaming the 16-year-old by saying she was known to the department for past conduct.
“Our point of view is a 16-year-old is still a child,” Harris said, and Ross “had a huge emotional advantage. This guy used her.”
The 35-year-old firefighter resigned his $63,769-a-year job on March 8, one day before a disciplinary hearing into his conduct at Fire Station No. 17 on Feb. 10. The incident was reported as a rape 11 hours later, on Feb. 11, by the victim’s boyfriend.
Ross, an 11-year department veteran, faced five counts of conduct unbecoming a city firefighter for:
•Using a wireless Internet connection at Station 13 for “unauthorized activities.”
•Using a wireless Internet connection and his personal laptop to transmit to third parties pictures of himself engaged in sexual acts with women.
•Using a wireless Internet connection, while on duty, to “engage in online sexual conversations.”
•Engaging “in sexual intercourse with a female visitor” and photographing the activity with his personal camera.
•Allowing a “breach of security” at the fire station during that encounter. Delaney, the city’s prosecutor, said there would be no point in pursuing Ross on criminal charges because he took a “self-imposed sanction” by resigning.
Detectives who looked at photographs of the sex acts concluded the conduct was consensual and “not a rape” as the girl’s boyfriend initially had reported to police. Tucker said he did not know how the young man concluded his girlfriend had been raped by the firefighter.
The reopened investigation developed “some additional information, but it didn’t change our opinion as to filing charges in this case,” Tucker said.
The supervisor in the prosecutor’s sexual assault unit, two prosecutors in that same unit and his chief criminal deputy all reviewed the file, and unanimously agreed there was no case to prosecute, Tucker said.
“Police reinterviewed the victim and the alleged defendant,” the prosecutor said. “They found no force was used.
“We have some real credibility problems with the victim,” Tucker said. “She’s admitted lying before” about details of the firehouse incident.
As a result of the Ross incident, city employees are no longer allowed to link their personal computers to the city’s network, said city of Spokane spokeswoman Marlene Feist.
Roberts said the conclusion of the criminal investigations will now trigger the police department’s internal affairs review, which could lead to disciplinary sanctions against the detectives.
“This is not really a ‘normal situation,’ ” Roberts said. “It isn’t like running into a kid up at Franklin Park with beer and shaking your finger and pouring the beer out – there goes the evidence and you call the parents and have them come and get him.”
The deputy chief said detectives would never have seen the evidence if they weren’t involved in responding to a reported rape at a city fire station in the middle of the night.
“There will be a review of the department’s and the detectives’ response to this incident, start to finish,” the deputy chief said. “There may be need for policy changes … training changes. We’ll make sure those happen and announce them.”