They'll Be Back: PATCON, Oklahoma City, and Jesse Trentadue's Lonely Crusade for Justice

 

PATCON's handiwork: A fireman holds an infant killed in the 1995 OKC bombing.

(Updated and revised.)

“His name used to be Don Jarrett,” long-time federal asset John Matthews told FBI Special Agent Adam Quirk during a July 9 phone call. Matthews was concerned that he would have to testify in a lawsuit filed by Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue seeking the release of long-concealed video tapes from the `1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Trentadue believes that the suppressed tapes would help identify “John Doe II,” a dark-haired, heavy-set man seen by dozens of people in the company of Timothy McVeigh on the day of the bombing.

“John Doe II” remains at large, and the FBI is perversely determined to protect him. For reasons that will be explained anon, Trentadue is convinced that learning his identity is necessary in order to obtain a measure of justice on behalf of his late brother Kenneth, who was killed while in federal custody shortly after the bombing. 

PATCON asset John Matthews.

 Matthews was scheduled to testify during a federal court hearing in Salt Lake City last July. On the basis of what he had told Trentadue, Matthews was expected to describe how the FBI was closely monitoring McVeigh in the hours leading up to the bombing. 

The FBI continues to insist – despite abundant evidence to the contrary -- that there was no advance warning of the OKC terrorist attack, and that John Doe II and the "others unknown" referred to in Timothy McVeigh's indictment do not exist.

Trentadue maintains that there is a “strong possibility” that the long-suppressed video recordings captured McVeigh in the company of a second person who would be identifiable as “an FBI undercover operative."

During the July 9^th phone call with Matthews, Mr. Jarrett told the jittery federal informant to avoid testifying if he could, and to perjure himself if he must. He was also instructed to call Special Agent Quirk, who eagerly reinforced that advice.

“I ain't goin' and I ain't saying nothing unless somebody issues me a subpoena,” Matthews told Quirk, according to a transcript obtained by Trentadue. Even if “they haul my ass to Salt Lake City, I'm gonna set [sic] there on the stand and say I don't recall anything.”

“That's fine,” was Quirk's approving reply to Matthews' announced intent to commit perjury.

In a conversation on the following day, Matthews reiterated his determination to avoid a subpoena.

“Well, yeah, and I mean – worst case scenario, even if you testified you can just – you can say you have, you know – you have nothing to say,” advised Quirk.

Matthews, eager to please a high-ranking officer of the American Cheka, suggested that he might take a trip in order to avoid receiving a subpoena.

“That's fine,” gloated Quirk. “F*ck 'em, right?”

Back at ya: FBI Special Agent Quirk.

It was during the second conversation with Quirk that Matthews explicitly mentioned his role as an undercover operative in an FBI initiative called called PATCON, or “Patriot Conspiracy.” This was a long-term provocation campaign in which the Bureau sought “to infiltrate and incite the militia and evangelical Christians to violence so that the Department of Justice could crush them,” explains Trentadue.

The man Matthews had known as “Don Jarrett” had been his FBI handler – and apparently still is, given the deference to him shown by Matthews. Now that the Regime has largely shifted its domestic focus from Muslims back to “sovereign citizens,” Jarrett is probably busy orchestrating homeland security theater operations involving the “Radical Right.”

Assuming that "Don Jarrett" is still the name of Matthews' former handler, he may currently be working as an "Independent Insurance Professional" in Florida. According to his vita, Jarrett retired from the FBI in 1998, becoming an insurance investigator and security consultant for the NFL. It's not clear how he wound up in Afghanistan last year:  A May 1, 2013 email to Matthews reported that he was in Afghanistan, and that he expected to leave at the end of June. 

Using his last known email address, I sent Jarrett a number of questions to which he has not replied. Given PATCON's history the chances are pretty good that wherever Jarrett finds himself, bad things are being done to innocent people.

“Ruby Ridge was a PATCON operation,” Trentadue has pointed out. “Waco was a PATCON operation. And so, too, I believe, was the Oklahoma City Bombing.”

The same is probably true of the little-remembered October 1995 sequel to the OKC Bombing – the derailment of the Sunset Limited, an Amtrak train carrying 248 passengers. Sleeping car attendant Mitchell Bates was killed and 78 others were injured when four of the train's 12 cars careened off a 30-foot trestle.

A rail joint bar supporting a critical section of the track had been removed by a saboteur who also knew how to short-circuit sensors that would have alerted the Amtrak engineer of trouble on the tracks ahead.  Typewritten notes on both sides of the track expressed outrage over the familiar litany of federal crimes and claimed responsibility on behalf of a group calling itself “Sons of Gestapo” (SOG).

Publication of the SOG manifesto caused many foreheads to crease in puzzlement: This was a right-wing terrorist group so obscure that its existence was unknown even to Morris Dees and his ever-vigilant comrades, who are sensitive to every tremor of “right-wing extremism” occurring anywhere in the soyuz.

SOG was unknown prior to the derailment, and hasn't been heard from since. The FBI insists that it is continuing to investigate the derailment. For the past seven years, Victor Hooper, an electrical engineer from Anaheim, California, has been telling anybody in the Bureau who will listen that he knows who carried out that attack, and why it was done.

“That derailment was carried out by some of the people who helped McVeigh build the bomb for Oklahoma City,” Hooper insisted during a telephone interview with me. He claims to have known at least two of them as neighbors in Anaheim, where they became involved in drug trafficking as part of a neo-Nazi criminal syndicate –and that John Doe II is actually a young man he has known since childhood.

As Hooper tells the story, the man he identifies as John Doe II and whose identity is known to the FBI, worked closely with Kingman, Arizona resident Michael Fortier, who was involved in the OKC bombing plot and spent ten years in prison after agreeing to testify against McVeigh. According to Hooper, John Doe II told him that “McVeigh was trained in sabotage and taught him how to derail a train.”

He made a deal: Fortier.

Following the bombing, and publication of a composite sketch of “John Doe II,” FBI agents descended on Kingman en masse. Hooper claims that “Doe” and a handful of co-conspirators (who originally called themselves “Kings of Kings,” before adopting the moniker “Sons of Gestapo”) staged the Amtrak attack as a diversion, working in cooperation with another, longer-established neo-Nazi group.

“I heard these guys talking about derailing a train, but at the time I didn’t take it seriously,” Hooper told me. “For years I’ve been trying to get the FBI to act on this, and I’ve been told that the investigation is still open, but they’re not doing anything about this. They moved heaven and earth to get Osama bin Laden, but their investigation into John Doe II has been lackluster, at best. Why are they denying the testimony of twenty witnesses who saw McVeigh with another John Doe, and saying that John Doe II didn’t exist?”

“The FBI says that they’ve investigated the case, and they’ve planted agents around the people involved in the train derailment,” Hooper continued. “But it’s been nearly twenty years now, and they’ve not done anything about it.”

During his conversation with me, Hooper made it clear that he doesn’t hold Jesse Trentadue in particularly high esteem. However, they emphatically agree that the FBI knows the identity of John Doe II, and continues to protect him. 

In a motion asking federal District Judge Clark Waddoups to hold the FBI in contempt of court, Tretadue points out that in 1995, Jarrett was involved in the Kingman, Arizona branch of the OKC Bombing investigation. At the time he was involved with the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in Phoenix, which was obsessively focused on "right-wing extremism." 

The FBI poured a huge amount of resources into the Amtrak derailment investigation, which it styled "Operation Splitrail." As is nearly always the case, the operation was either a huge failure as an investigation, or a hugely successful effort to avoid solving the crime.

Trentadue learned as much when he was “contacted by a man named Victor Hooper … who claimed to have information about both the Bombing and the Palo Verde train derailment that occurred in Arizona shortly after the Bombing. Hooper told [Trentadue] that the derailment was done to distract the FBI from the Arizona part of the Bombing investigation.”

 

FBI's least wanted: John Doe II.

During a conversation with Matthews in 2013, Trentadue recounted what Hooper had told him. That information was relayed by Matthews to his handler, and a short time later Jarrett contacted Trentadue to tell him that the derailment case “was still open; that the derailment had in fact caused resources to be shifted away from the Arizona portion of the Bombing investigation; and that Jarrett himself was transferred from the Bombing investigation to the [derailment] case.”

Even more importantly, Jarrett demanded that Trentadue “keep the Hooper information confidential because Hooper knew things about how the derailment was carried out that only the perpetrators would have known and that he, Jarrett, or others within the FBI would follow up with Hooper.”

By “follow up,” Trentadue understood, Jarrett probably meant “shut down.” This can mean witness tampering, as in the case of John Matthews. It could mean protecting the identity of key undercover operatives, such as “John Doe II.” In the case of Kenneth Trentadue, it meant killing someone who had been misidentified as an FBI asset with critical knowledge of the Bureau’s role in the OKC bombing plot.

 For the better part of two decades, Trentadue has tenaciously pursued the truth about the murder of his brother Kenneth while in federal custody. 

On parole after serving prison time for bank robbery, Kenneth was detained in San Diego for a supposed parole violation and transported to the Federal Transfer Facility in Oklahoma City shortly after the bombing.  His body was “found” hanging in its cell on August 21.

In body type, facial features, age, and even criminal record, Kenneth was a near-twin of Richard Lee Guthrie, a bank robber who was already in federal custody. Guthrie had been involved in a gang called the Aryan Republican Army (ARA) that staged bank robberies to fund domestic terrorism – including, apparently, the OKC bombing. Along with McVeigh, members of the ARA were frequent guests at a white supremacist commune in Oklahoma called Elohim City, which was overrun by government undercover operatives: German national Andres Strassmeir, Klan activist Dennis Mahon, Robert Millar, and former OKC socialite-turned-ATF asset Carol Howe.

The Feds who detained Kenneth Trentadue and beat him to death thought they were disposing of Guthrie, who knew enough about the government’s role in the OKC bombing to betroublesome. Not long after Kenneth was murdered, Guthrie fell victim to his own oddly staged “suicide.” This would have tied up some critical loose ends – if Kenneth’s family hadn’t found a dangling thread, and pulled on it has hard as they could. 

Assets: Mahon (l.) with ATF informant Carol Howe.

By the time Kenneth's mother Wilma was informed of his death, the crime scene was sanitized and the body prepared for cremation. Through her shock and bereavement, Wilma Trentadue had the clarity of mind to demand that her son's body be preserved for a funeral.

As Wilma and older brother Jesse were finally allowed to see Kenneth's mortal remains, they were further afflicted by the company of Michael Hood, regional counsel for the Bureau of Prisons.

As Jesse later recalled the conversation, the suitably named Hood issued a singularly unsubtle warning: "The Bureau of Prisons, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office -- we're one big Justice Department.”

Jesse was astute enough to understand the import of that remark, and brave enough to treat it with the contempt it deserved. His resolution hardened into fury when he and his mother peeled away several layers of crudely applied makeup and examined the condition of Kenneth’s body.

"My brother had been so badly beaten that I personally saw several mourners leave the viewing to vomit in the parking lot!" Jesse wrote in an August 30, 1995 letter to the Bureau of Prisons that pulsated with tightly controlled rage. "Anyone seeing my brother's battered body with his bruised and lacerated forehead, throat cut, and blue-black knuckles would not have concluded that his death was either easy or a 'suicide'!”

Kenneth had committed crimes in his life and made his full allotment of mistakes, but at the time of his abduction he was the married, honestly employed father of a young child. 

Finding himself the hopeless captive of the most despicable human beings defiling the earth, Kenneth defiantly chose to die on his own terms, thereby leaving behind evidence that his death was an act of state-sponsored murder, rather than despairing suicide.

"Had my brother been less of a man, your guards would have been able to kill him without inflicting so much injury to his body,” Jesse pointed out in his letter to the BoP. “Had that occurred, Kenney's family would forever be guilt-ridden over his death. Each of us would have lived with the pain of thinking that Kenneth took his own life and that we had somehow failed him. By making the fight he did for his life, Ken has saved us that pain, and God bless for having done so!"

In 2001, a federal judge ruled that the FBI had lied about the circumstances of Kenneth Trentadue’s death, and had destroyed vital evidence in the case. The family received $1.1 million in damages, $250,000 of which was set aside as a reward for information leading to the prosecution and conviction of Kenneth’s murderers. Jesse Trentadue has continued to pursue civil action against the FBI, beginning with his demand to see the suppressed video footage of the bombing. The Bureau, displaying the resourcefulness of inveterate liars with unlimited funds, has employed every dilatory and diversionary tactic it can conjure, including the remarkable excuse that the recordings are lost somewhere in the trackless depths of the agency’s evidence from the OKC bombing investigation.

Today (November 13) Trentadue was in court seeking to have the Bureau held in contempt, and asking for the appointment of a “special master” to “oversee [the FBI’s] compliance with the court’s orders, particularly relating to the allegations of witness tampering, and with Plaintiff’s FOIA request.” While  acknowledging the agency’s misbehavior, and “chiding” them for it, Judge Waddoups declined to sanction the Bureau. That limp rebuke prompted a protest from the FBI’s attorney, Kathryn Wyer, who indignantly insisted that the matter was closed because the Bureau had investigated itself and found no wrongdoing.

In 2007, shortly after filing his FOIA request for the OKC bombing videos, Jesse Trentadue contacted by convicted co-conspirator Terry Nichols, who is serving a life sentence for his role in the bombing and cannot be tried again on capital charges. With Trentadue’s assistance, Nichols filed a deposition in a Salt Lake City federal court.

In that sworn statement, Nichols claimed that McVeigh — who allegedly had been recruited as an undercover intelligence asset while in the Army — had been working under the supervision of Larry Potts, the same FBI official who wrote the murderous “rules of engagement” at Ruby Ridge and later supervised the annihilation of the Branch Davidians at Mt. Carmel, Texas. Coordinating the OKC operation was a Deputy Attorney General named Eric Holder, who later played an important role in covering up the circumstances of Kenneth Trentadue’s death.

Trentadue's legal crusade began as an act of filial loyalty. It has become a struggle to expose the truth about the FBI's ongoing  campaign of surveillance, infiltration, provocation, and political murder. 

"The reason [the FBI] doesn't want that tape released is ... that one of the people getting out of that truck on the morning of April 19, 1995, was working for the FBI," Trentadue said in an interview with Lew Rockwell. "The FBI had, I now know, at least five or six undercover operatives linked in with McVeigh in Elohim City. What I don't know is the motivation behind the bombing.... What is not clear is whether it was a sting operation gone bad, that the plan was to stop it but the FBI failed, or else they wanted it to happen, as horrible as that sounds.... It's clear that they facilitated the bombing, directly or indirectly. It's clear they didn't stop it."

As is so often the case, the best defense the Regime can make on its behalf is to plead murderous incompetence. In the best Soviet-style tradition of bureaucratic privilege, those most deeply implicated in the crime have been abundantly rewarded.

Today, Larry Potts enjoys a well-compensated sinecure as a Vice President with ambiguous duties for the Scientific Games Corporation. Eric Holder, who reinstated the OKC-inspired domestic terrorism task force in January of this year, is stepping down as Attorney General in anticipation of an even more lucrative reward. John Doe II and his associates remain at large, as does Mr. Jarrett, and countless other members of the FBI’s merry troupe of Homeland Security Theater players. We’ll be hearing from them again. 

(My thanks to commenter "ATFsux," who pointed out some important information about Mr. Jarrett's background.)

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Offend the Police -- Lose Your Job

How police deal with "customer" complaints.

(See clarification below.)

 When an employee in the productive sector offends the company's customer base, he can expect to the censured, sanctioned, or sacked. Customers who complain about such an employee can expect that their opinions will be listened to politely and respectfully. After all, the owners of the company are vividly aware that the public can take its business elsewhere, so retaining their loyalty is a compelling priority.

By way of contrast, when a police officer employed in the coercive sector alienates the public through misconduct or criminal abuse, the offended “customers” are treated with suspicion and hostility. The public will be told to accommodate the police officer’s behavior, and the “customers” will be sternly reminded of their duty to render unconditional loyalty to the agency employing the miscreant.

Since law enforcement cannot go out of “business,” it doesn't have to worry about public disaffection. The role of police is to distribute violence on behalf of the political class, which is the only clientele they have to please. When a police department is informed of officer misconduct, the institutional priority is to discredit the aggrieved “customers,” rather than to listen to their complaints.

Unlike an employee in the productive sector, a police officer who provokes public criticism is likelier to be promoted rather than terminated. In some jurisdictions, a citizen who files a complaint against an abusive cop can face official retaliation, or even criminal prosecution for filing a “false report” if the complaint is dismissed, which happens in most cases.  

As Shawn Peterson has learned, a citizen who uses social media to criticize police abuses can find himself – and his employer – on the receiving end of orchestrated vilification by the police.

Because he criticized the police on his personal Facebook page, Peterson wound up being fired from his job as a cook at Leslie's Family Tree diner in Santaquin, Utah, in which he provided a worthier public service than any of his tax-devouring antagonists. His termination had nothing whatsoever to do with his job performance; the café’s owners acted in self-preservation after police across the country started an online campaign to drive down the business’s ratings in social media review sites.

Like millions of other Americans, Peterson is alarmed and disgusted by the overt militarization of law enforcement and the impunity enjoyed by police when they kill, assault, or otherwise victimize innocent people. Giving what he now considers improvident expression to his frustration, he posted a Facebook comment containing a photograph of a uniformed figure sprawled in a pool of blood with a caption reading: “This is what a good cop looks like.”

The comment was quickly noticed by members of police organizations that patrol social media in search of reasons to take offense. Cops made screenshots of the comment, learned of Peterson's employment at Leslie's Family Tree, and began to barrage the restaurant's Facebook page with hostile comments in a coordinated campaign to pressure the owner into firing Peterson.

Within a few days, recounts the Salt Lake Tribune, “the café’s Facebook rating began to plummet as negative reviews poured in” from across the country. Acting out of tribal solidarity, and exercising their well-established propensity for habitual lying, some of the police officers who commented on the restaurant’s Facebook page spread rumors that Peterson was poisoning the food.

Leslie Broadhead, owner of the family-operated restaurant, called Peterson in a panic. Displaying courage and character rarely if ever displayed by a cop, Peterson acted on behalf of the interests of his employer, telling Broadhead that “The only way we’re going to be able to solve this is if you fire me.”

The owner agreed, and shortly thereafter posted a contrite announcement to the company’s Facebook page that read like a public confession wrung from a Soviet dissident during the Moscow Show Trials:

“We are disgusted to hear the opinions of our FORMER employee. Fortunately we live in a country that gives us freedom of speech. Unfortunately it can also hurt people who are innocent. … We do respect our law enforcement and appreciate all the work and sacrifices you make to keep us safe.”

In addition to terminating her loyal employee for an opinion he had expressed on his own time, Broadbent offered free meals to law enforcement officers, who – as members of the tax-devouring class – already dine at the expense of others.

That gesture didn’t earn the approval of Utah resident Cindy Moss, the aunt of 22-year-old Darrien Hunt, who was recently gunned down by police in Saratoga Springs.

At the time, Hunt was carrying a replica sword. The officers who murdered him, reciting from the familiar catechism of self-justification, claimed that they acted to prevent “harm” to bystanders, none of whom was in any way alarmed or threatened by Hunt. In similar fashion, the officers claimed that Hunt had “lunged” at them with the sword – yet somehow managed to be shot six times in the back.

The police account was predictably dishonest, self-contradictory, and inconsistent with both witness testimony and physical evidence – and it was just as predictably ratified by the Utah County DA’s office, which ruled the murder a “justifiable homicide.” In addition to avoiding prosecution, Hunt’s killers can now stop by Leslie’s Family Tree diner for a free meal anytime they please. Such are the perks of being part of the killer elite.

“My sister still hasn’t been able to pay for her son’s funeral,” complained Moss in a message to Broadhead, “and you are giving a free meal to the guys who killed her son because they were cowards and created the death of an innocent man!”

The same offer is open to the SWAT operatives who recently killed Jose Calzada after the dejected resident of Roy, Utah called a suicide prevention hotline. The Weber County Attorney’s Office is treating the killing as a case of “suicide-by-cop.”

The officers who killed Hunt and Calzada are on paid vacation, which means they have plenty of time to visit Leslie’s Family Tree and get a free steak dinner. Peterson, who expressed his outrage over such insouciant, privileged violence in an admittedly ill-advised fashion, is scraping to get by while looking for a new job.

After Peterson was fired, the restaurant’s Facebook page, which had been cluttered with hateful and threatening comments from police officers, was similarly littered with messages of triumphant approval.

“You did the right thing getting rid of him,” gloated Officer Joseph Valdora. “Thanks for supporting the folks who keep us all safe” – “all,” that is, except for Darrien Hunt, Jose Calzada, and others whose names are inscribed in the ever-growing roster of innocent police victims.

“I commend and appreciate Leslie’s [sic] in taking the appropriate action and terminating Shawn Peterson,” wrote Randy Rogers, a “Texas Peace Officer.”

“We do indeed live in a great country that affords us great freedoms,” declared “a Southern California LEO.” “These freedoms do not, however, exempt us from accountability when we choose to exercise them recklessly.”

“Very happy to see that Leslie’s Family Tree has decided to protect itself from its own employee,” remarked Officer David Cobb. “She did `the right thing,’ and has shown everyone that while freedom of speech is essential to us all, Leslie has demonstrated that there are consequences for one’s actions.”

Of course, every police officer claims to be endowed with “qualified immunity,” the purpose of which is to protect himself from the “consequences of [his] actions” when they result in actual injury to an innocent person. While Peterson’s Facebook post could properly be described as offensive, it inflicted no demonstrable injury to anybody – apart from wounding the unwarranted pride that police officers feel in their disreputable profession.

One of the comments condemning Peterson, and commending his boss for firing him, was posted by Ed Diaz, a retired New Jersey police sergeant who used his own Facebook page to post a meme celebrating the shooting death of Michael Brown. The photo displayed a barroom sign beneath a Coors Light logo advertising the “Michael Brown special – 6 shots for $12.00”

People in the racket called “law enforcement” consider the reckless exercise lethal force by police to be a public service, but the uninhibited exercise of free speech in criticizing their profession to be a crime.

“This is absolutely disgusting,” wrote Christine Heathman on the diner’s Facebook page. “Shawn’s behavior is a threat to law enforcement and he should be fired and if we’re lucky he should go to jail.”

Apparently, the bold and valiant badasses who supposedly risk their incomparably valuable lives to hold criminal violence at bay require protection against nasty Facebook comments.

There is actually a precedent, of sorts, for prosecuting someone for online criticism of the police. Earlier this year, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals overturned the conviction of Thomas Smith, who had been charged by an exceptionally inventive prosecutor with “disorderly conduct and unlawful use of a computerized communication system.” Smith’s supposed crime was referring to police in the tiny town of Arena, Wisconsin as “f*****g racist bastards.”

Rather than considering the strong possibility that Smith’s assessment was correct, a jury quickly convicted him following a perfunctory trial. The appeals court sensibly ruled that while Smith’s remarks were uncouth, they didn’t constitute a “true threat” or “fighting words” under existing precedents that supposedly justify an exception to First Amendment protections. Despite the fact that his conviction was vacated, Smith was still abducted at gunpoint, shackled, fingerprinted, caged, and forced to endure a lengthy and expensive legal ordeal – and is left with an arrest on his record that will probably cloud his employment prospects – because he had offended the tender sensibilities of armed “public servants” who threaten and exercise violence as an occupation.

Shawn Peterson is not the first person gainfully employed in the productive sector to be fired as the result of a social media campaign by police targeting his employer.

Ashley Warden and son Dillan.

Ashley Warden lost her job as a waitress at an Oklahoma City Chili’s restaurant in May 2013 following an anti-police Facebook post – a photo of sheriff’s deputies with the comment,

“Stupid cops better hope I’m not their server FDP.” The restaurant fired Warden following a social media pressure campaign of the sort that later led to the termination of Shawn Peterson from his job.

“This is what she posts and what she chooses to post during Law Enforcement Week when we are honoring those who have died in service to our citizens – I think that’s pathetic,” pouted Sheriff John Whetsel, who claimed that Warden had “threatened” his officers. Warden “doesn’t have a clue about who they are or what they do or the service they provide,” Whetsel continued. 

As it happens, Warden’s appropriately contemptuous view of law enforcement was informed by the “service” provided by Piedmont Police Officer Ken Qualls, who wrote her a $2,500 ticket for “public urination” after her 3-year-old son tried to relieve himself in the family’s front yard.

The Warden family resides on a two-and-a-half acre plot in a small, rural town. When Dillan, the toddler, pulled down his pants, Qualls – who had been lurking nearby – screamed up to the home in his cruiser and announced to that he was issuing a citation, despite the fact that the child hadn’t actually completed the act.

As disgruntled “customers” of the “service” Qualls provided, the Wardens contacted his employer, who said, in essence, “Sucks to be you.” After the family informed the media of what had happened, the ticket was dismissed. A few days later, Qualls was fired by the town council – not for what he had done to the Warden family, of course, but because of negative press coverage his behavior had attracted to the city government. That is to say, he was fired because he offended the only clientele he was expected to please.

No risk of starvation: Qualls.

Qualls had spent 18 years as a police officer – and already qualified for a pension -- which means that he most likely has never had an honest job and wasn’t facing destitution, however much he deserves it.

Unlike Shawn Peterson, who acted on behalf of his employer, Qualls displayed the bottomless self-preoccupation that typifies his profession by filing a lawsuit against Police Chief Alex Oblein and the City of Piedmont. In doing so he acted on the assumption that he had a property right in a well-compensated and stress-free job as a practitioner of state-licensed violence.

Clarification

In the original version of this essay, I relayed the Salt Lake Tribune's mistaken account of Shawn Peterson's Facebook comment. He did not post the offending photo to his Facebook page, nor did he tag the restaurant's Facebook page: He posted a comment on a thread that was critical of police abuse; that comment was noticed by cops who learned where Peterson worked and decided to punish him by blackmailing his employer into firing him. This is Stasi-caliber thuggishness, which is pretty much what we should expect from those people.

I did contact Mr. Peterson a few days ago, but at the time he was understandably reluctant to discuss the matter in detail. What actually happened was much worse than the version I originally described -- and shows the extent to which police are scrutinizing their critics, and the lengths to which they are willing to go in order to punish them.

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Killer on the Loose: Did Cops "Botch" a Case to Punish an Independent DA?

"Comply or Die is Not the Law": Relatives of police victims speak at Oct. 4 rally in Salt Lake.

 After 72-year-old Robert Warren was shot in the face at the front door of his home in West Valley City, Utah, the police quickly identified and arrested the likely shooter and three accomplices. Two days later, while the victim was still recovering from surgery, the alleged assailant, suspected gang member Raymond Marquina was back on the streets, because the West Valley PD hadn’t provided sufficient evidence for an indictment.

“I would say we are just as surprised as anyone else that this case wasn’t charged the first time around, but we’ll do everything we can to get him back into jail,” insisted West Valley PD Public Information Officer Roxeanne Vainuku. The Fraternal Order of Police was quick to defend the West Valley PD, describing the “accidental release” of the suspect as an “understandable” mistake on the part of the police – while blaming Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill for creating “an extreme public safety risk” by refusing to charge Marquina.

 

At large: Marquina.

“We know there is enough evidence to support filing charges against the other three suspects, as they remain in custody and have been charged,” asserted the FOP in an October 31 press release. “Why will DA Sim Gill not address the real reason why the man who pulled the trigger was released?”

The “real reason” for Marquina’s release is the valuable and often-ignored constitutional provision called the habeas corpus guarantee, under which a suspect must either be charged or released within a very brief period of time. Marquina was arrested on October 22 and released a week later because, as Gill explained, “under our Constitution we simply can’t hold people because we want to, no matter how much I may have wanted to hold him.”

Not satisfied with mere innuendo, the FOP claimed that “the evidence to charge Raymond Marquina was there [and] the DA’s office was aware of this”; this is supposedly documented in email exchanges for which the police union has filed a public records request.

Although “a mistake is understandable, DA Sim Gill’s covering up of the mistake is not,” declared the FOP, demanding that Gill act on its public records request “without delay.” For his part, Gill said that he welcomed the release of the emails and that his office had “nothing to prove other than to do our job diligently and work with our local law enforcement on this issue.”

Gill’s concept of diligence might differ from that of at least one member of his team – Steve Nelson, who is Chief of the Violent Felonies Unit. The attempted murder of Robert Warren certainly qualifies as a violent felony, which means the case would fall within Nelson’s area of responsibility – and it’s reasonable to expect that his name would figure prominently in any interoffice email traffic dealing with it.

Of even greater interest is the fact that Nelson, a Republican, is running against his Democrat boss as the preferred candidate of the FOP, which seeks to remove Gill as punishment for his unsuccessful manslaughter prosecution of former West Valley City Narcotics Detective Shaun Cowley, who killed Danielle Willard two years ago.

Nelson’s vita depicts him as the flinty-eyed nemesis of gang-bangers, boasting of his 2008 “Gang Prosecutor of the Year” award, his 2010 RICO prosecution of the Tongan Crip Gang, and a long string of professional plaudits, crowned with “an award of special recognition from the director of the FBI.”

It is inconceivable that Nelson would not have been in the loop in the Marquina case. Indeed, nailing a Surenos gang associate for the attempted murder of an elderly man two weeks before the election would certainly play well with voters – assuming that Nelson could take credit for the bust, rather than his rival, who also happens to be his boss.

FOP throws a tantrum to protest the Cowley prosecution.

The FOP carefully avoided any mention of Nelson’s possible role in Marquina’s “accidental release,” choosing instead to advance its characterization of Gill as a “cop-hating,” criminal-coddling outsider. 

Flogging a nauseatingly familiar theme, the Utah FOP and its supporters denounced Gill’s decision to prosecute Cowley as a threat to that most precious of all things, “officer safety”: By holding Cowley accountable for shooting a terrified, unarmed young woman in a parking lot when he faced no credible threat to his life, Gill would cause other officers to “hesitate” rather than killing out of reflex.

“My concern is that a guilty verdict in this case will jeopardize the safety of the community by making police officers fearful of defending themselves against criminals who are threatening deadly force,” explained former federal judge Paul Cassell (who later acted as defense counsel for Cowley) in a letter to FOP attorney Brent Rawson.

Neither Cassell nor Rawson explained how the “safety of the community” is enhanced by preserving the lethal impunity that police officers currently enjoy. This is because the only segment of the “community” whose safety matters to Cassell, Rawson, and their ilk are police officers and their faithful “partners” in the criminal “justice” system.

This explains why the entire “justice” establishment in Salt Lake County has turned against Gill with the vehement hostility of True Believers dealing with an apostate. Could Maquina’s release have been a product of something other than incompetence?

Marquina’s arrest and indictment wouldn’t generate positive headlines for Nelson. His supposedly inexplicable release without charges generated negative headlines for his opponent. Viewed from the perspective of cynical political self-interest, Nelson had more to gain by blowing the case, because the proverbial buck doesn’t stop on his desk. But if the evidence wasn’t sufficient to hold Marquina, the fault doesn’t reside with Nelson any more than it would with Gill. This means that the delinquency, or deliberate sabotage, occurred in the West Valley PD, a department that – even more than most – is run like a street gang.

“Either the FOP and the WVCPD botched this because they are incompetent, or they botched it because they’re corrupt,” declares Utah attorney Ed Flint, who until recently was a prominent  a criminal defense lawyer in Salt Lake County and knows all of the principals very well.

Emphasizing that he was “just putting two and two together,” Flint believes that the fault doesn’t lie with Gill or Nelson (whom he describes as a “quality trial lawyer” tragically in thrall to the police), but with the DA’s enemies in the police union.

“The cops and the Fraternal Order of Police are slimy, corrupt, and out to get Gill,” Flint elaborates. “Gill says he can’t charge [Marquina] on `made-up’ evidence. The [West Valley] PD knew what they needed to do, they didn’t do it…. They brought the evidence for the accomplices, but not the [would-be] murderer, because it makes a bigger headline, and a bigger last-minute-before-the-election slimy smear on the DA they’ve decided is not their puppet.”

Gill was supported by the FOP during his last campaign, which made the foreign-born Democrat politically palatable in conservative, Republican-heavy Salt Lake County. Flint reports that the controversy over Marquina’s release is having a measurable negative impact on Gill’s image. Flint describes how a close friend, “a staunch Democrat,” is thinking about supporting Nelson out of the belief that Gill “needs to come clean” about something that most likely is not his fault.

“Who do you think screwed up?” Flint continues. “The DA for refusing to abuse the Constitution, or the cops for refusing to provide sufficient evidence on one of [the] suspects to sustain probable cause?”

Asked if he thought that the FOP possess sufficient amoral deviousness to arrange the release a violent criminal in order to obtain political leverage against an independent DA, Flint was unequivocal: “Absolutely. They are that evil, and that Machiavellian. No doubt.”

Marquina is a “known gang associate,” which means that the cops can keep “a close eye on [him] so he won’t be too far away to grab, and for them to grab the publicity of re-arresting the [would-be] murderer that Sim let go,” Flint predicts. This would most likely happen after the election, however it turns out.

The Utah FOP has doubtless taken alarm over the growing public disaffection with the police, which has been propelled by outrage over the Danielle Willard case and dozens of others similar to it.

On October 4, hundreds of Utah residents – many of them relatives of people who had been killed by police -- congregated outside the Scott Matheson Courthouse in Salt Lake City. Invoking the theme of the protest, Sandy resident Edward Peltekian, a former civilian police volunteer, declared: “`Comply or die’ is not the law. We are not subjects, we are citizens.”

Remorseful Sheriff: Lawrence addresses Oct. 4 rally in Salt Lake City.

The concluding speech at the rally was offered by former Davis County Sheriff William Lawrence. In 1974, Lawrence helped organize one of the state’s first SWAT teams. On September 22, 2008, his son-in-law, Brian Wood, was killed by that SWAT team outside his home following a 12-hour standoff.

After suffering a breakdown of some kind, Wood called 911 to report (falsely) that he had beaten and raped his wife. SWAT operators used chemical weapons to force Wood from the pickup truck in which he had taken refuge, then treated him to a barrage of rubber bullets, projectile bean bags, and pepper-spray rounds, in addition to tear gas and flash-bang grenades. While Wood was prone and helpless, he was shot with a Taser at least eight times by one officer, and an unknown number of times by a second — before being shot at point-blank range by another officer wielding a .308-caliber rifle.

One witness described the onslaught as “horrible — just like someone tormenting an animal in a cage.”

In his speech at the October 4 rally, Lawrence pointed out that in recent decades, law enforcement officers have been marinated in the conceit that they are a caste apart from, and superior to, the population they supposedly serve. Whatever else can be said about Salt Lake County DA Sim Gill, he apparently agrees with those concerns.

For the FOP, it is unacceptable for a prosecutor to take the side of the Mundanes in any case involving the use of lethal force. The union had motive, means, and opportunity to “botch” the Marquina case as an election-eve dirty trick at Gill’s expense.
 

Setting a would-be killer loose did create, as the FOP acknowledged, “an extreme public safety risk” – but that’s a trifling price to pay to punish an enemy of the police union and preserve the privileges of Salt Lake County’s coercive caste. 

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Dum spiro, pugno!