Letters Say The Police Harassed Teen, Officer

"This whole thing has pretty much ruined me completely," he said, adding that his wife of a year has filed for separation. "They just destroyed my career. My family is embarrassed. They destroyed my marriage. They destroyed this girl's reputation. Something needs to happen. And I worry nothing will."

The teenager's mother shares his concern, according to her letter addressed to Ebert.

"This poor officer has been humiliated by his department for accusations that are completely false. Our daughter is devastated that the very officer that has been here to help her and us is being put through this and is currently suspended without pay as they look for reasons to fire him or force his resignation," she wrote. "I would have made this complaint to the board of directors of the Town Of Haymarket, but I know that with past incidents involving the chief and others within the department it gets swept under the table and kept hushed."

The police department has been embroiled in a series of problems over the past few years.

An officer was accused of standing guard at an illegal poker game in Fairfax County. Roop and Breeden were each suspended for 15 days without pay after a sexual harassment investigation initiated by a former officer's complaints that they often made sexually explicit comments. And Breeden was accused of trying to break down his estranged wife's door.

The department also came under fire when it dismantled the auxiliary program last year, in what the dismissed officers characterized a retaliatory slap in the face.

In her letter, the teenager wrote that her conversation with Roop came after other officers had questioned her and asked about messages from Ishmael on her MySpace page. The officer read the posted messages out loud, over and over, she wrote.

"I said the comments were never meant to be taken as a sexual comment and that we never did anything and then he read another message and at that time I started to cry and walked out," she wrote.

"Then he said well how many times did you guys hug. I told him one time," she wrote. "I told him that I saw him and that I ran over to his car when he was working and hugged him while he was inside his car and that it was just a friendly thank you for helping me with a situation that just happened. I said that I knew I shouldn't have done that but Ben didn't know I was going to hug him."