By John O’Brien
Post-Standard
SYRACUSE, N.Y. — An Onondaga County sheriff’s deputy says he did nothing wrong in using a TASER on a woman seven months ago, and that his boss was playing politics by suspending him.
Deputy Sean Andrews wrote a lengthy e-mail to his friends and family giving his side of the arrest of Audra Harmon on Jan. 31 in a traffic stop in Salina. He blasted Sheriff Kevin Walsh for suspending him without pay for 30 days -- one week after the story was reported in The Post-Standard Aug. 13 along with a video of the arrest from Andrews’ dashboard camera.
That video later drew a national audience on NBC’s “Today” show, CNN and CBS.
Andrews, 37, a deputy for four years, wrote the e-mail shortly after the story broke, according to his mother, Joan Andrews. He told a reporter he was forbidden from commenting. The e-mail was intended for a few friends and family, his mother said. The Post-Standard obtained it from a source unrelated to the Andrewses.
Walsh was furious the day the story was published, Andrews wrote. Walsh asked Andrews to resign that afternoon, and Andrews refused, the e-mail said. Andrews questioned the timing of his suspension -- long after the arrest but shortly after media coverage of it.
The “big kicker” is that a day after the arrest, Andrews wrote, his immediate supervisor wrote a memo to administrators saying Andrews did not violate the sheriff’s policies on use of force or Tasers.
“It is no mystery that this was a completely political move on the sheriff’s part because he realizes that the video alone with no explanation does not look good and he feels his job will be in jeopardy,” Andrews wrote. He asked people to write to Walsh to express their outrage. Andrews ended the e-mail by saying he hopes a new sheriff will be elected next year.
Walsh said last week he’d read the e-mail, but would not comment on it. Andrews did not send it to Walsh.
Walsh said he’s received “a considerable amount of e-mails, letters and phone calls” about the case. None of them will have any impact on the eventual decision by a civil service arbitrator handling Andrews’ administrative charges, Walsh said.
Andrews’ e-mail gives this account:
He pulled Harmon over because it appeared she was talking on her cell phone, which he says he observed in his mirror as she drove behind him. He then pulled over on Hopkins Road to let her pass, and she accelerated to 50 mph in a 45-mph zone.
Going 5 mph over the limit “is not a gross violation of the speed limit, but an offense nonetheless.” Harmon became argumentative after he pulled her over. He told her repeatedly not to get out of her minivan after she told him she wanted to see his in-car video. As he walked back to his patrol car, Harmon got out of her van and Andrews ordered her back in.
“At this time she is committing the offense of disorderly conduct because her car door is ‘obstructing vehicular traffic,’ a subsection of the law,” Andrews wrote. “I drew my Taser on her because we are trained in the police academy and throughout our careers that all people are considered a threat on a traffic stop... Anyone with hands can kill a cop, it doesn’t matter how old they are.”
In training, he watched a video of a traffic stop in which a police officer was shot to death by an elderly man who could barely walk.
Andrews told Harmon she was under arrest after she refused his order to get back in the van.
“She then decided to get back in the vehicle,” he wrote. “Too late.” He walked up to the van and put his Taser away because Harmon had two of her children inside. He told her to get out and she refused, so he pulled on her arm, he said. She then reached between the two front seats.
“Police are trained to never get near someone if you can’t see their hands,” Andrews wrote. When his hand slips off her arm, Harmon “pops out of the vehicle at me, which is why you see me retreat to the rear of the vehicle to keep my distance from her since I could not see if she had any type of weapon in her hands.”
Andrews drew his Taser again and gave Harmon commands that she did not obey. She started to get back in the van, so he Tasered her.
“I was not going to let her get back inside because if she takes off then I will have a vehicle pursuit with two kids in the car.”
He accused Harmon of trying to gain sympathy by overstating how much the Taser hurt.
“Of course, the video alone does not look good to the public because the general public have difficulty putting themselves in a cop’s position,” Andrews wrote.
He questioned why neither Harmon nor her lawyer made available to the media a video and audio recording of the arrest taken by the Taser. Harmon’s lawyer, Terrance Hoffmann, said he was unaware until two weeks ago that the device recorded.
After reading Andrews’ e-mail, Harmon said she concurs with his recitation of the facts, with a few exceptions. She said she did not pop out of the van at Andrews, but merely stood in the doorway with her hands visible.
Harmon, who’s suing the sheriff’s office, said she never reached between the seats. She was holding onto the steering wheel with both hands to prevent him from pulling her out, Harmon said. If she was holding on with one hand, as he claims, Andrews would have easily been able to get her out, she said. Andrews is 10 inches taller than Harmon, 38.
She disputes his reason for arresting her -- obstructing traffic. If he was concerned about traffic, he would not have dragged her into the middle of the road, she said. The disorderly conduct charge and the two other charges -- speeding and resisting arrest -- were later dropped.
She said her hands are clearly showing in the video, and that it shows she was not posing any physical threat to Andrews.
Her lawyer, Hoffmann, notes that Andrews’ justification of his actions was apparently not supported by the sheriff who suspended him or the district attorney’s office, which dropped the charges against Harmon.
Walsh said two weeks ago that Andrews had been reassigned from road patrol until an internal affairs investigation was finished. Andrews wrote in the e-mail that he was taken off road patrol for five days in May -- three months after the arrest.
“If this incident was so bad then why wasn’t I pulled off the road right away?” he asked in the e-mail.
Andrews got a job he’d applied for as a crime analyst. After the five days were up, he worked overtime on road patrol, Andrews wrote.
The Taser policy used by the sheriff’s office says deputies should deploy them only to “control or otherwise subdue violent or potentially violent individuals.”
Lorie Fridell, a criminology professor at the University of South Florida, said the video does not seem to support the use of the Taser against Harmon.
“It didn’t look like she was threatening the officer at all,” said Fridell, who conducted a research project funded by the Justice Department on police use of force. “That woman was being verbally noncompliant.” In such a situation, 80 percent of police agencies she surveyed across the country said they would not deploy a Taser, Fridell said.
Andrews’ mother, Joan, said the national attention has taken its toll on her son and his family. He was in the Army for five years before retiring to take care of her and his father, who are both fighting cancer, she said.
Sean Andrews had top security clearance when he was in the Army, his mother said. After he got out, he did background checks on people for the federal government, his mother said. As a sheriff’s deputy on road patrol, people used to call his station to compliment him for being so helpful and cool-headed in answering their calls, she said.
Joan Andrews said that after the story was published, her son got more than 70 text messages from other deputies offering their support.
“You will not find anyone who truly knows Deputy Andrews who will state he has anger management problems or has ever had any conflicts in college, or the work force, his military service or his current employment as deputy sheriff,” she wrote in an e-mail to the newspaper.
Copyright 2009 Post-Standard