Associated Press
BALTIMORE — One of six Baltimore police officers formerly charged in the death of a black man fatally injured in a police van says she was surprised to hear her name when charges were announced.
Sgt. Alicia White, the first accused officer to give a sit-down interview, told WMAR-TV and The Baltimore Sun for stories broadcast and published late Thursday that she was devastated by State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s announcement after Freddie Gray’s 2015 death. She hadn’t consulted a lawyer since it had never occurred to her that she would be implicated, she said.
“I felt blindsided,” White said. “I didn’t see that coming at all. I was devastated. I broke down and started crying. It was hard; it was a hard pill to swallow.”
White was responsible for investigating complaints about Gray’s arrest, Mosby said in the televised announcement. Gray was already injured when White first encountered him, Mosby said, but she “spoke to the back of Mr. Gray’s head,” and did nothing more when he didn’t respond.
White’s interaction with Gray lasted just seconds, attorney Ivan Bates said, and if he was indeed injured then, White didn’t see anything medically wrong and wasn’t trained to recognize the injuries an autopsy showed Gray had suffered.
White was charged with manslaughter, assault and misconduct. Prosecutors dropped all charges after three officers were acquitted, but they’ve said they only did so because they believe the judicial system was stacked against them. White maintains she did nothing wrong.
“I still believe that, when I went to work that day, I did everything that I was trained to do,” White said. “Unfortunately, that day someone lost their life. But I feel like everything I was trained to do, I did.”
Asked if she would have done anything differently, White answered, “No.”
White said she prayed for Gray’s family as they struggled with loss and for her hometown as unrest broke out. White faced severe anxiety, and said at one point she was rushed to a hospital. The stress led her and her fiance to call off their engagement, and without pay, she said she faced financial difficulties. She has since received $96,800 in back pay and is now assigned to the training academy in an administrative role.
Still, the case is not yet behind her. An internal investigation has not yet concluded and White and four of the other officers in the case are suing Mosby for defamation.
The country’s current police brutality debate is fueled in part by the Gray case. Gray was a 25-year-old black man whose neck was broken while he was handcuffed and shackled but left unrestrained in the back of a police van in April 2015. The death set off protests and the worst riots in the city in decades.
The Department of Justice launched a patterns-and-practice investigation into the Baltimore Police Department afterward and found officers routinely used excessive force, made unlawful stops and were racially discriminatory. The department has undertaken similar wide-reaching investigations into the police in Chicago, Cleveland, Albuquerque and Ferguson, Missouri, among other cities.
White hopes to return to policing and granted interviews as she works to clear her name. She said she still believes she can serve the community.
“This is home for me. So to be able to continue to help serve the community in which I grew up in, that’s important to me,” she said.
White was assigned to Councilman Brandon Scott’s neighborhood and he worked with her at the community children’s center, where he said people would “welcome her back with open arms.”
“I know her character,” he said. “This is someone I trust with my life and, more importantly, that we entrust with the lives of young people in the neighborhood.”