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Officers Reach Beyond Beat's Boundaries
Despite their department having no travel budget, Officer John Chapman, right, and Detective Charlie Gardiner of the Dumfries Police Department found ways to journey 400 miles to Ohio in an Internet child predator investigation.
(By Jahi Chikwendiu -- The Washington Post)
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The benefactor, of sorts, turned out to be the Dumfries town manager, Dave Whitlow, who responded to the police chief's pleas for help with $150 from the town coffers for gas and tolls.
Driving in the pickup that his partner uses for gang cases, Chapman and Gardiner left at 3 a.m. on Aug. 29. They drove seven hours straight, their only food a bag of chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin cookies that Gardiner's wife made.
Arriving in Monroeville at 10 a.m., Chapman and Gardiner spent the day with Ohio sheriff's investigators typing up an affidavit and getting a search warrant. "It was necessary for them to come here," said Detective Sgt. Dane Howard of the Huron County Sheriff's Office. "I would have been hard-pressed to draft a search warrant on the statements of an officer I had never met."
Ohio officers treated their Northern Virginia colleagues to lunch, and Chapman and Gardiner then drove an hour and 40 minutes that afternoon to Gardiner's parents' home in Concord, Ohio. They put them up in a spare bedroom and cooked them dinner.
Gardiner, 42, said Ohio officers had offered to put them up for the night if his parents hadn't come through. "Yeah, we work on a shoestring budget," Gardiner said, "but I think you'll find that law enforcement helps law enforcement, no matter where you're at."
Their creative financing might have paid off. With help from Ohio sheriff's deputies, they arrested a man, Matthew Hohler, on charges including raping a 12-year-old boy. Prince William and the FBI are investigating the case, said law enforcement sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing.
An attorney for Hohler, 20, said his client will enter a plea of not guilty. "At this point, I don't know what the allegations are other than the bare-bones charges," said the attorney, K. Ronald Bailey. "I did hear something to the effect that it had something to do with a contact down in Virginia."
At a time when attention is focused on the growing sexual exploitation of children through the Internet, law enforcement officials said Chapman and his partner went above and beyond the call of duty.
"Those officers . . . who were willing to give up their personal time and money just to make this case, that's a big thing,'' said Howard of the Huron sheriff's office. "Cops are dedicated, but I don't know that every officer would have done what they did."
The total out-of-pocket expense for the trip: about $20 apiece for Chapman and Gardiner.
These days, Chapman is back on his laptop, balancing three active child porn investigations with the demands of patrol and police work. He is determined to soldier on, he said, because "we're here to protect the kids.''
