CULPEPER, Va. — There was shouting, the police officer had his gun drawn and the Jeep Wrangler was rolling across a parking lot, said Kris Buchele, who took notice just in time to witness the deadly climax between the officer and a Sunday school teacher.
The officer, jogging alongside the Wrangler, tapped on the driver’s-side window with his gun as Patricia Cook rolled it up, Buchele remembered, and then the order came in a booming voice: “Stop or I’ll shoot!”
(AP) - Culpeper police officer Daniel Harmon-Wright, 32, of Gainesville, Va.
More crime and safety news
The crash occurred on Constitution Avenue near where a vigil was held by the Rolling Thunder group.
Police pursuit earlier this week led to two accidents, one involving a school bus.
Police said the victim was ejected from a vehicle that overturned on the highway.
The Jeep kept moving, and the officer fired at point-blank range into the Jeep, Buchele recalled. He said that Cook made a left and that Officer Daniel Harmon-Wright darted into the street, taking five more shots at the back of the vehicle as it drove away.
Adam Forster, another witness, saw the Wrangler plow into a telephone pole. Cook, 54, of Culpeper, was declared dead soon after on that February morning.
“Why did she do it? Why did she do it?” Forster recalled Harmon-Wright telling other officers who arrived.
Buchele’s and Forster’s accounts were key to a special grand jury in Culpeper County issuing a rare indictment against a police officer this week: committing murder while in the line of duty.
But an attorney for Harmon-Wright, 32, of Gainesville, offered a dramatically different version of events, saying eyewitnesses saw only the tail end of the encounter. He said his client, a former Marine and Iraq war veteran, fired because he feared for his life. By Daniel L. Hawes’s account, Cook was the aggressor and might have been seeking to take her own life.
When Harmon-Wright fired, Hawes said, his fingers were trapped in the window of the moving Jeep and Cook had refused his order to stop.
A community shaken
The killing has shaken and outraged the 16,000 residents of Culpeper, a town that has not had another fatal police shooting since its department was created in 1956. It has also left an enduring mystery: How could an encounter between a homemaker with no criminal record and a police officer responding to a routine call end in death?
“I miss the conversations, making plans to go here or there, no longer having a future to look forward to,” Gary Cook, Patricia Cook’s husband, wrote in an e-mail to The Washington Post. “It’s very lonely at home. The apartment is dark, quiet. There’s no cheer in my life.”
The encounter between Harmon-Wright, who is apparently a graduate of Vienna’s James Madison High School, and Cook began early Feb. 9. Harmon-Wright was dispatched to investigate a report of a suspicious person in the parking lot of Epiphany Catholic School about 10 a.m.
“One of the school staff noticed a woman circling the building,” said Michael J. Donohue, spokesman for Diocese of Arlington. “That seemed odd to staff. One of the staff asked her to leave and she refused, so they called police.”
In the account provided by Harmon-Wright’s attorney, the five-year police veteran approached Cook’s vehicle and asked for identification. As Harmon-Wright reached inside the car to grab it, Cook began rolling up the window, trapping the officer’s fingers, Hawes said. Cook put the car in gear, Hawes said, and Harmon-Wright jumped up on the running board as the Jeep began moving.
The Post Most: LocalMost-viewed stories, videos and galleries int he past two hours
Loading...
Comments