Alexandria Police Chief Charles E. Samarra has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to review the fatal police shooting of Lewis Barber during a tense, 20-hour standoff in April.
The request comes after the police department's Internal Affairs Division presented a report to the Alexandria Human Rights Commission recently that clears two officers involved in the shooting of Barber, who had abducted his son at gunpoint. The commission voted 13 to 1 to accept the internal police investigation.
But some commission members said the report does not address several of their questions. They voted with the understanding that Samarra will review police procedures, tactics, training, command structure and actions in the shooting and report back to the commission on lessons learned and any changes that need to be made.
"I've always had a practice that we have nothing to hide," Samarra said later in an interview. "I want the community to rest assured that everything has been considered in the case." He said he makes it a practice to request an independent examination of police action.
Barber, 48, a carpenter, abducted his 9-year-old son, Philip, after his wife, Robin, obtained a temporary protective order. Barber took the boy to his home, on West Wyatt Avenue in the Del Ray section of the city, and held him while police outside tried to persuade him to allow his son to leave.
After 20 hours of mostly fruitless attempts to negotiate, Barber came outside with a gun. Two officers shot him three times as he stood on the front porch. Philip later was returned to his mother, who has since sold the house and moved with the boy to Florida.
"I am deeply grateful to the police department for their work on this -- the fact that they protected Philip and their candor in this investigation. But it's not done yet," said commission member Andrew Hyman. "I want to know what we should have done differently."
At the hearing, police officers said that during the standoff, they did not know of Barber's intense devotion to his son, who has a mild form of autism.
Samarra, who was on the scene with his deputy chiefs, said one of the reasons police decided to take action that afternoon was that Barber had become increasingly hostile to police, threatening to shoot them "between the eyes." He was becoming more intoxicated and refusing to negotiate, Samarra said, and they feared for Philip's safety.
"Do I think he would have hurt Philip based on everything we know now?" he said. "No."
Commission members said they have no doubt that police did as they should during the last six critical seconds, when Barber was shot. "They didn't have a choice," said Jimmie McClellan. "But the question that was in everybody's mind was, 'What brought them up to that moment?' That was something that troubled the commissioners."
McClellan and other commission members, in particular, want to know whether anything went awry in police planning that might have contributed to Barber's death.
