Endorsements and editorials are made solely by the ownership of this newspaper. As is the case at most newspapers across the nation, The Spokesman-Review newsroom and its editors are not a part of this endorsement process. (Learn more.)
Editorial: Latest Zehm case revelations appalling
The drip … drip … drip of revelations from the Otto Zehm case continues to torture the Spokane Police Department and City Hall. Each drop creates a ripple of questions that goes unanswered. Former Spokane police Officer Karl Thompson Jr. has been convicted of using excessive force and lying to investigators, but several other people played a part in covering up what happened at the Zip Trip in 2006.
Interestingly, it is Thompson’s attorney’s bid to toss the jury’s verdict that has intensified suspicions that the wrongdoing goes deeper. Documents filed in response to the call for a new trial show officers involved in the deadly confrontation were given three days to ponder what happened before writing their incident reports. They met and wrote their reports as a group while consulting with a union-provided attorney.
One of the officers, Jason Uberuaga, said he met twice with Assistant City Attorney Rocco Treppiedi before giving grand jury testimony in 2009. Shortly after that, he met twice more with Treppiedi and then asked to “clarify” that testimony. Treppiedi, who seems to have been behind every scene of this tragic case, would go on to build the city’s legal defense in the civil case.
Mayor David Condon is right to be skeptical of Treppiedi’s actions, saying, “I think it’s fundamentally flawed when one person dispensed advice and then defends that advice.”
It’s more than flawed; it’s flabbergasting. Who allowed this to happen?
Questions also swirl around the involvement of Grant Fredericks, a Canadian forensics expert who was brought in to review the Zip Trip security video of the confrontation after he offered to help build the defense that the 2-liter bottle in Zehm’s possession was a threat to Thompson. Fredericks is alleged to have provided “patent inaccuracies or inconsistencies” in other cases. When Fredericks undertook a video analysis for federal prosecutors in the criminal case, he was still billing the city of Spokane and funneling information back to Treppiedi, according to recently unveiled documents.
This is the stuff of pulp fiction novels, except that it really happened.
Now, several backtracking police officers are in hot water with the feds, and the city is stuck with a civil lawsuit in which it blames the victim for his death – a view that has been contradicted by the then-assistant police chief. It is stunning that Treppiedi clings to employment.
The city has impaneled a Use of Force Commission to review the training and practices of Spokane police officers, and that process is under way. The panel is also supposed to look into the details of the Zehm case. A federal prosecutor is alleging “an extensive cover-up” and “a violent abuse of power.”
A review is sorely needed because the steady drip of revelations has raised important questions. If they go unanswered, the erosion of public trust will continue.