Two Montgomery County police officers are suing the county to prevent Montgomery’s inspector general from scrutinizing the way the police department handled an accident involving a former assistant fire chief, court records show.
Sgt. Edward Shropshire and Capt. Willie Parker-Loan don’t want the police department to share the results of an administrative investigation with Inspector General Tom Dagley.
Dagley is investigating how the county handled a four-car pileup on Interstate 270 last November caused by former Assistant Fire Chief Greg DeHaven, in which DeHaven’s county-owned sport utility vehicle hit a police car.
Soon after the accident, county officials acknowledged allegations of a drunken-driving cover-up. But the police department’s investigation found that the officers did nothing wrong, police spokesman Lt. Paul Starks said.
The Examiner first reported that a junior police officer on the scene thought he may have smelled alcohol on DeHaven’s breath. But Shropshire and Parker-Loan said they did not.
The officers administered a field sobriety test they said DeHaven passed. They issued him a $130 ticket for “failure to control vehicle speed on a highway to avoid collision” and let him go.
But when he was tested three hours later by at the fire department’s drug and alcohol testing site, DeHaven had a blood-alcohol level at twice the legal limit, according to the Washington Post’s account of a confidential fire department report.
Shropshire and Parker-Loan’s lawyer said in court records that the internal affairs investigation was part of their confidential personnel records and the officers would suffer “irreparable harm” if they were released to Dagley.
The lawsuit was filed Tuesday, and the county has not yet responded in court. But County Attorney Leon Rodriguez told The Examiner that it was the county’s opinion that “those records do need to be disclosed to the inspector general.”
DeHaven, whose name is still listed on the county’s online employee directory, has said he was unfairly forced out of the department because of the accident and is trying to get his job back. Police Chief Richard Bowers has said DeHaven retired.
