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In a stinging rebuke to one of Florida’s most influential
sheriffs, a federal judge found that a state law enforcement
official had probable cause to believe that one of the sheriff’s
deputies had fatally shot his girlfriend as she was preparing to
leave him.

The sheriff, David B. Shoar of St. Johns County, had waged a
yearslong campaign to convince the public that Rusty Rodgers, an
agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, had
violated the rights of the deputy, Jeremy Banks, during the
state’s reinvestigation of the shooting, originally ruled a
suicide by the sheriff more than seven years ago.

The judge, Brian J. Davis, on Friday dismissed a lengthy civil
case filed by Deputy Banks, with strong support from the
sheriff, accusing Agent Rodgers of, among other things, coaching
witnesses and filing false and misleading information to a state
court in support of his request to search the deputy’s property.

In the order tossing out the lawsuit, the judge concluded, “Even
in the light most favorable to the Deputy Banks, the record,
considered in its entirety, reflects a thoughtful examination of
difficult facts and circumstances.”

While concluding that Agent Rodgers had acted legally, the judge
did not rule on whether the death was a suicide or a homicide —
merely that the state agent had had probable cause, based on
what he knew at the time, to believe that Deputy Banks might
have been responsible.

The case has long stirred strong emotions in St. Augustine,
where the 2010 shooting of Deputy Banks’s girlfriend, Michelle
O’Connell, pitted one law enforcement agency against another and
led to the appointments of three special prosecutors.

Deputy Banks remains on the force after prosecutors said they
did not have enough evidence to charge him. He denies harming
Ms. O’Connell.

The circumstances of the shooting and the sheriff’s response
raised broader questions about how well the police can
investigate allegations of domestic violence within their own
ranks. Ms. O’Connell, a single mother of a 4-year-old girl, was
fatally shot with Deputy Banks’s service weapon. No suicide note
was found.

Agent Rodgers, a former agent of the year, was asked to re-
examine the shooting after Ms. O’Connell’s family complained
that the sheriff had not properly investigated her death. The
state agent subsequently determined that the sheriff had botched
the case with missteps that included failing to collect
important evidence at the crime scene. Agent Rodgers also
uncovered evidence that appeared to contradict Deputy Banks’s
account of how Ms. O’Connell had died.

The shooting and the sheriff’s attempts to discredit Agent
Rodgers were the subject of two New York Times investigations as
well as a documentary by the PBS program “Frontline.”

The Times, after reviewing thousands of pages of investigative
files and legal documents, reported in June that Sheriff Shoar’s
attacks on Agent Rodgers were based largely on unsupported
allegations and innuendo.

The judge’s order on Friday tracked closely with what The Times
had found. The court ruled that many of Deputy Banks’s claims
were argumentative and unsupported in the more than 3,000 pages
of documents in the case record.

According to Deputy Banks’s account, he and Ms. O’Connell were
home alone late one night in September 2010 when she began
packing her things to leave. Although they had argued that
evening while driving back to the house they shared, he said,
they did not argue once they were home.

Yet Agent Rodgers found two neighbors who said they had heard a
woman screaming for help before the sound of gunshots. The
sheriff’s officers had not bothered to interview neighbors, or
Ms. O’Connell’s family, before declaring the death a suicide.

Sheriff Shoar repeatedly claimed that Ms. O’Connell had been
suicidal, but Judge Davis noted that “the vast majority, if not
all of Ms. O’Connell’s family members and friends reported she
was in good mental health, not likely to commit suicide, and was
looking forward to the future.”

Sheriff Shoar has not retreated from his conclusion of suicide,
citing the findings of two state medical examiners. A third
pathologist, Dr. William R. Anderson, later hired by the family,
concluded that Ms. O’Connell had died from a gunshot “inflicted
by another.” After exhuming the body, Dr. Anderson — himself a
former state medical examiner — discovered that Ms. O’Connell
had a cracked jaw, a fact that had not been noted by the first
two medical examiners.

At the time, Sheriff Shoar issued a statement calling the
exhumation “reprehensible” and accusing Ms. O’Connell’s mother
of “molesting” the body by removing it from its “place of rest.”

A lawyer for Agent Rodgers, William J. Sheppard, said on Monday
that the judge’s order was “as expected, because Agent Rodgers
did nothing but his job in an efficient and honorable way, as he
has done for the past 30-plus years.”

In an email, Deputy Banks’s lawyer, Mac McLeod, expressed
disappointment in the judgment and said they would consider an
appeal. “We respect the efforts of the court and certainly will
analyze the order in great detail as we move forward,” he said.

Sheriff Shoar did not immediately respond to a request for
comment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/us/florida-rusty-rodgers- jeremy-banks-lawsuit-dismissed.html
 

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