IAPE Evidence Blog

www.floridatoday.com, floridatoday.com
BYLINE:
Link to Arti­cle
One Video

Cop’s depar­ture after alleged drug thefts causes stir in
Dec. 1, 2011

West Mel­bourne, FL

Retiree accused of lift­ing drugs but never charged

Sur­veil­lance video: Retired West Mel­bourne cop in …: In this sur­veil­lance video, retired West Mel­bourne Police Com­man­der Charles Schrum is seen tak­ing pre­scrip­tion drugs with­out per­mis­sion from the Police Dep­tart­ment prop­erty and evi­dence room in June 2009. Pro­vided, posted Nov. 30, 2011 FOR FLORIDA TODAY

WEST MELBOURNE — By all pub­lic accounts at the time, for­mer West Mel­bourne police com­man­der Charles Schrum retired from the city on a med­ical dis­abil­ity and his posi­tion was elim­i­nated among more than a dozen cuts and lay­offs in 2009.

Few peo­ple knew that the 20-year police depart­ment vet­eran had been wit­nessed by fel­low police offi­cers tak­ing pre­scrip­tion drugs from the department’s evi­dence room twice in a three-day period, a report shows.

Pub­lic records, released Wednes­day as a result of a FLORIDA TODAY request, indi­cate Schrum admit­ted to con­sum­ing the drugs because he was suf­fer­ing from an addic­tion to pain pills. But Schrum was never arrested, never faced crim­i­nal charges and now receives a monthly pen­sion of $3,245.

West Mel­bourne Police Chief Brian Lock inves­ti­gated the alleged drug theft and reviewed it with top offi­cials at the State Attorney’s Office, who deter­mined the case couldn’t be prosecuted.

Within days of the inci­dents, Schrum applied for dis­abil­ity for unre­lated med­ical mat­ters. That was approved and he received dis­abil­ity ben­e­fits until his retire­ment was offi­cial in January.

But Lock didn’t tell West Mel­bourne City Coun­cil mem­bers — his direct super­vi­sors — and that has the well-respected police chief whose catch phrase has always been “I love my job” in hot water today.

“I think it’s out­ra­geous. I think we should expect more from our police chief,” said West Mel­bourne Coun­cil­man Michael Hazlett, who is call­ing on Lock to resign and for a fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion. Hazlett and the chief have had an ongo­ing bat­tle over Hazlett’s attempt to cut the department’s budget.

“Our city has made so many won­der­ful strides. And I have to talk to peo­ple about our old­est employee in the city mak­ing bad judg­ments. It’s really disturbing.”

FLORIDA TODAY couldn’t reach Schrum for com­ment. But Lock, con­tacted Wednes­day, said he stands by his decision.

“I had a cri­sis on my hand. I was wear­ing my HR hat and didn’t know what I was deal­ing with. I was try­ing to do the right thing as an employer,” he said.

Con­cerns about Schrum resur­faced about two weeks ago when an anony­mous let­ter alleg­ing the thefts was sent to Hazlett’s Palm Bay business.

Hazlett for­warded the let­ter to City Man­ager Scott Mor­gan and City Attor­ney Jim Wil­son to be inves­ti­gated. Mor­gan asked Lock about the mat­ter. Lock con­firmed that Schrum had admit­ted to tak­ing drugs from the evi­dence room.

City offi­cials also con­tacted the Florida Depart­ment of Law Enforce­ment. FDLE reviewed the reports pro­vided from city offi­cials, but is not con­duct­ing a fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion, spokes­woman Susie Mur­phy said.

“We felt it had already been inves­ti­gated,” she said, refer­ring to Lock and Assis­tant Police Chief Mike Czernik’s review of the mat­ter immediately.

Evi­dence on tape

Accord­ing to the police report gen­er­ated at the time, Sup­port Ser­vice & Police Tech­nol­ogy Direc­tor Mike Helms was mak­ing rou­tine checks of the department’s sur­veil­lance cam­eras on June 18, 2009, when he noticed the cam­era in the evi­dence room was point­ing toward the ceiling.

Helms reviewed older seg­ments and found video of Schrum enter­ing the evi­dence room the pre­vi­ous morn­ing, putting his hand over the cam­era and point­ing it toward the ceil­ing. The tape also shows Schrum leav­ing the room after putting some­thing in his pocket.

After review­ing the tapes, Czernik entered the evi­dence room with another detec­tive on June 19, 2009, and found evi­dence bags appeared to have been moved.

About an hour later, Schrum again entered the evi­dence room, this time as the video was being viewed by Czernik and Helms. Schrum, accord­ing to the inves­tiga­tive reports, moved some items around, left momen­tar­ily and returned with a cart, which he loaded with pre­scrip­tion drugs.

Schrum, the report says, was tak­ing the cart of drugs down the hall to a bath­room when Czernik stopped him and ordered him to return the drugs. Accord­ing to the reports, Schrum admit­ted to Helms and later Lock that he took the drugs and he “needed help.”

Inci­dent reports

Lock said he con­tacted the State Attorney’s Office by phone shortly after the inci­dents. But the first doc­u­mented con­tact between Lock and the State Attorney’s Office was a con­fi­den­tial report filed Sept. 16.

That memo from Lock to Assis­tant State Attor­ney Wayne Holmes indi­cates Lock and Helms took Schrum to Cir­cles of Care. Lock wrote that Schrum esti­mated he had taken more than 60 pills that week.

Holmes and city offi­cials said the alleged drug theft did not impact any crim­i­nal cases. All of the drugs thought to be taken by Schrum were from peo­ple who had died nat­u­rally, but unat­tended by a doc­tor. Police, Holmes said, often are called to a scene and col­lect med­ica­tions as a part of their investigation.

Holmes said Wednes­day there were sev­eral issues that pre­vented the case from being pros­e­cuted suc­cess­fully. Among them was the fact Schrum was admit­ting the theft to his bosses and case law pre­vents that from being used against a pub­lic employee in a crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion. “The bot­tom line is you only have sus­pi­cion, but for his com­pelled state­ments, which you can’t use,” Holmes said.

In most cases, law enforce­ment agen­cies con­duct their own inves­ti­ga­tions when employ­ees are sus­pected of com­mit­ting a crime, Holmes said. “Twenty-twenty hind­sight polit­i­cally, he prob­a­bly should have asked for some other agency to look into it, dot­ted all the I’s and crossed all the T’s,” Holmes said. “And you don’t have issues like this com­ing up two years after the fact.”

City lead­ers ques­tion, how­ever, why more was not done administratively.Lock said he did not tell city offi­cials about the case because West Mel­bourne was going through a “tumul­tuous” time with an out­go­ing city man­ager. And Lock claims, the sit­u­a­tion with Schrum had been “stabilized.”

Schrum went to a reha­bil­i­ta­tion facil­ity out of state, Lock said. Lock claims the city could not have had a ter­mi­na­tion hear­ing dur­ing that time and would have been vio­lat­ing Schrum’s due process to fire him with­out one. “We would be defend­ing a law­suit now that he would win,” he said.

Con­tact Cer­venka at 321 – 242-3632 or scervenka@floridatoday.com.

- — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — -
Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org

Tampa Bay Times, tampabay.com
BYLINE: Lee Logan, Times Staff Writer
Link to Article

Pasco County, FL

NEW PORT RICHEY — The day after a 66-year-old woman was found dead in her New Port Richey home, a deputy returned to the scene and took the woman’s wal­let and check­book. He told the land­lord he wanted to safe­guard the items so no one would take the woman’s money or buy things in her name.

But he never entered the items into evi­dence, never men­tioned them in the report on the woman’s death in April. About two months later, when inter­nal affairs detec­tives asked Deputy Jason Boria about the wal­let and check­book, he insisted he never took them.

Then the detec­tives asked to search his patrol car.

Boria began stut­ter­ing and shook his head ‘no,’ accord­ing to a Pasco County Sheriff’s Office report released Thurs­day. Inves­ti­ga­tors had to remind him that the squad car was agency prop­erty before he gave up the keys.

“I feel like I should have some rep­re­sen­ta­tion,” he said, accord­ing to the report. “I’m start­ing to feel like I’ve done some­thing wrong.”

Inside the trunk, detec­tives found the check­book and wal­let, which was empty. They also found evi­dence that hadn’t been sub­mit­ted in other cases, includ­ing three traf­fic tick­ets, a mem­ory stick with pho­tographs from a domes­tic bat­tery inves­ti­ga­tion, a pre­scrip­tion for Oxy­codone and sur­veil­lance videos from three retail theft cases.

Boria also had 11 dri­ver licenses and a state-issued ID card that were wrapped in a rub­ber band. Deputies often con­fis­cate fake or expired licenses, but they are required to sub­mit them as evidence.

Boria, 35, resigned from the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office in August, amid an inves­ti­ga­tion into the woman’s wal­let and check­book. He had been with the agency more than five years. He received an $8,559 pay­out of unused vaca­tion time. The agency agreed not to chal­lenge an appli­ca­tion for unem­ploy­ment com­pen­sa­tion, though he has not filed one yet.

“A lot of times it’s in the best inter­est of both the Sheriff’s Office and the mem­ber to resign,” said sher­iff spokesman Kevin Doll.

A mes­sage left Thurs­day with Boria’s attor­ney was not returned.

Boria was dis­patched April 29 to the home of Claire Chan­dler, who had been bat­tling can­cer. She lived in rental in New Port Richey and had worked for Wal­mart 17 years. Accord­ing to her land­lord, Patri­cia Shotwell of Orange Park, Chan­dler had no fam­ily. She grew up in Cal­i­for­nia as a fos­ter child and left when she turned 18. She never married.

Neigh­bors noticed Chandler’s car hadn’t moved for sev­eral days. Her cell phone went straight to voice mail. Shotwell asked deputies to check on her. Chan­dler was found lying on her kitchen floor.

Boria filed a report on the death. Shotwell said the deputy returned the next day for the wal­let and check­book. He told her of a pre­vi­ous case where some­one had bought a $7,000 car using a dead person’s money and per­sonal information.

Later, when Shotwell read the death inves­ti­ga­tion report, there was no men­tion of the wal­let. “It gave me a really strange feel­ing,” she said. So she reported her con­cerns to the Sheriff’s Office.

In a series of inter­views, inves­ti­ga­tors gave Boria “ample oppor­tu­nity to explain the wal­let and check­book dis­crep­ancy,” the Sheriff’s Office report said. Dur­ing one inter­view, he told detec­tives “there was no chance he could have for­got­ten he took the items in question.”

Detec­tives found the items in a plas­tic box in the trunk of Boria’s patrol car. There was no cash in the wal­let, and Chandler’s credit union con­firmed there were no abnor­mal with­drawals from her account. Shotwell told detec­tives that Chan­dler tended to keep a “fair amount of cash” in her wal­let, though she didn’t look in it before giv­ing it to Boria.

The report says after the items were found, Boria said he sim­ply for­got to turn them in as evi­dence. He said he didn’t want to admit his mis­take and get in trouble.

“I took the check­book because I didn’t want it to get stolen,” he said, accord­ing to the report. “I didn’t want any­one to use it.”

Doll said deputies usu­ally remove pre­scrip­tion pills after a death inves­ti­ga­tion. They usu­ally defer to fam­ily mem­bers regard­ing other items.

“Gen­er­ally we don’t take too much, or even any­thing,” he said. “We want to turn it over to the fam­ily mem­bers as quick as pos­si­ble, so they’re respon­si­ble for it and not us.”

Boria had been rep­ri­manded in Sep­tem­ber 2010 for not pro­cess­ing evi­dence cor­rectly. He was sus­pended for a day then. He received another one-day sus­pen­sion back in Novem­ber 2009 when the agency deter­mined he vio­lated the agency poli­cies on con­flicts of interest.

The agency referred the most recent issue to the Pasco-Pinellas State Attorney’s Office to deter­mine whether any crim­i­nal charges should be filed. But pros­e­cu­tors deter­mined in August there was “insuf­fi­cient evi­dence of crim­i­nal intent.”

The Sheriff’s Office began writ­ing its inter­nal affairs report after pros­e­cu­tors declined to move for­ward with the case. Such reports are not released to the pub­lic until they are com­pleted. Doll said this report was delayed because the detec­tive and his super­vi­sor were on vaca­tion at dif­fer­ent times.

Lee Logan can be reached at llogan@sptimes.com or (727) 869‑6236.

- — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — -
Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org

The Day­tona Beach News-Journal, news-journalonline.com
BYLINE: FRANK FERNANDEZ, Staff writer: frank.fernandez@news-jrnl.com
Link to Article

Fla­gler County, FL

Koenig

BUNNELL — For­mer Fla­gler County Sheriff’s Deputy Matthew Koenig was on the other end of the DNA swab Tues­day after plead­ing no con­test to felony grand theft.

Koenig was an evi­dence tech­ni­cian with the Fla­gler County Sheriff’s Office when he was arrested in Jan­u­ary and accused of steal­ing $4,847 from a dozen envelopes in the evi­dence vault, replac­ing the cash with napkins.

Cir­cuit Judge Raul Zam­brano sen­tenced Koenig to 60 days in jail fol­lowed by five years’ pro­ba­tion, accord­ing to the terms of a plea agree­ment. Koenig also agreed to sur­ren­der his law enforce­ment certificate.

So, on Tues­day, Koenig — who in April 2007 was one of two deputies rec­og­nized by the Sheriff’s Office for solv­ing a string of bur­glar­ies — found him­self open­ing his mouth so a bailiff could take the cus­tom­ary DNA swab from defen­dants bound for jail.

Koenig, 40, could have received up to five years in prison and up to a $5,000 fine for the third-degree felony grand theft. Pros­e­cu­tors dropped a felony charge of offi­cial mis­con­duct against Koenig as part of the agreement.

Koenig must also pay resti­tu­tion of $4,800 to the Fla­gler County Sheriff’s Office and $1,000 for the cost of pros­e­cu­tion to the State Attorney’s Office. He must also per­form 50 hours of com­mu­nity ser­vice and write an apol­ogy let­ter to the Sheriff’s Office.

The only issue not decided in the plea agree­ment was whether Koenig would be adju­di­cated guilty by Zambrano.

Koenig’s defense attor­ney, Michael Poli­tis, asked that adju­di­ca­tion be withheld.

“He has no prior crim­i­nal record,” Poli­tis said. “We ask the court to with­hold as it cus­tom­ar­ily would for any other per­son that came before it in this kind of cir­cum­stances. We can’t for­give. We can’t accept why, but exten­u­at­ing cir­cum­stances with his health, he’s a father, he’s got two kids … the sit­u­a­tion with his health, with the econ­omy, things like that. It doesn’t excuse it, but it does give the court an expla­na­tion. He is going to jail, which is some­times out of the ordi­nary for these types of matters.”

Poli­tis said the most seri­ous of Koenig’s health issues is diabetes.

“Give him an oppor­tu­nity to con­tinue on with his life once he pays for this par­tic­u­lar crime so he can pro­vide for his fam­ily,” Poli­tis said. “He is vol­un­teer­ing his law enforce­ment cer­tifi­cate so he will not be placed in that posi­tion again.”

Assis­tant State Attor­ney Jason Lewis said the Sheriff’s Office asked that Koenig be adju­di­cated or found guilty.

Zam­brano opted to with­hold adjudication.

Still, a with­hold­ing of adju­di­ca­tion would count against Koenig if he should ever gets into trou­ble with the law again. Some employ­ers also ask whether a job appli­cant has ever had adju­di­ca­tion withheld.

Koenig declined com­ment after the hearing.

Sheriff’s Office spokes­woman Debra John­son declined com­ment Tues­day regard­ing the with­hold­ing of adjudication.

Koenig had worked at the Sheriff’s Office since 1998 and was earn­ing $46,927 a year when he was fired Jan. 23 after his arrest.

The inves­ti­ga­tion began after another evi­dence tech­ni­cian opened an enve­lope and dis­cov­ered the cash was missing.

Koenig’s DNA was found on the envelopes and the nap­kins, accord­ing to court records. Inves­ti­ga­tors also dis­cov­ered “unex­plained deposits” in Koenig’s per­sonal check­ing account from 2009 to 2010.

Inves­ti­ga­tors asked four Sheriff’s Office employ­ees with access to the evi­dence vault to sub­mit to DNA tests. Three of the four agreed. Inves­ti­ga­tors later served a search war­rant on Koenig, accord­ing to the charg­ing affidavit.

Koenig had been in trou­ble before. In Octo­ber 2008, Koenig was a Sheriff’s Office inves­ti­ga­tor when he was placed on paid admin­is­tra­tive leave while inves­ti­ga­tors checked a com­plaint by his mort­gage com­pany that he had bur­glar­ized his for­mer house, which had been fore­closed upon. That same month, the mort­gage lender vol­un­tar­ily dropped its com­plaint against Koenig.

It was a pre­cip­i­tous fall for Koenig, who helped solve a noto­ri­ous string of bur­glar­ies in 2005 when four local high school wrestlers broke into homes, some just days before Christ­mas to steal presents. Koenig and then Sheriff’s Office detec­tive Jason Joli­coeur, who is now with the Florida Depart­ment of Law Enforce­ment, were rec­og­nized for their work, which led to 20 cases being cleared and about $10,000 worth of stolen prop­erty being recov­ered, John­son said.

- — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — -
Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org