John Geer Shooting: Officer Adam Torres Displayed ‘Anger Issues’ 5 Months Before Shooting, Report Says
John Geer an unarmed dad of two girls, was killed 17 months ago by Fairfax County, Virginia, police officer Adam Torres. On Friday, a judge ordered the Fairfax cops to make Torres’ internal affairs records public — records that Geer’s family believes will show that the killer cop had previously known “anger issues” and should not have been on the scene of a delicate domestic disturbance call, carrying a gun.
About five months before he shot and killed Geer, Torres had a temper tantrum in a courthouse, reportedly screaming at a county prosecutor who decided to drop charges against a DUI suspect Torres had arrested — an incident that, according to Geer family laywer Ben DiMuro, demonstrates that Geer had “anger issues.”
“It raises a reasonable suspicion that perhaps these issues carry forward into the future,” DiMuro said in a local media interview.
The judge Friday ordered that documents related to the investigation of that courthouse outburst be released.
Officer Rodney Barnes, who was also on the scene when Torres shot Geer, told an internal affairs detective that Torres confessed that he and his wife had been arguing that morning.
Excerpts from the internal affairs interview with Barnes can be heard in the audio clip, above. The full interview with Barnes, lasting more than an hour, can be heard at this link.
The Geer family also hopes the records will shed light on why the department did not begin its internal affair inquiry into the fatal shooting of the 46-year-old John Geer until September of 2014 — more than a year after Torres killed Geer.
The timing of the investigation into the shooting has raised eyebrows because it did not begin until shortly after Geer’s family filed a $12 million wrongful death lawsuit against the county.
Geer was killed on August 29, 2013, as he stood in the doorway of his home with his hands raised, according to accounts from witnesses and police officers on the scene that day. Police were called by Geer’s longtime domestic partner and mother of his children, Maura Harrington, who said that Geer was throwing her belongings out of the house after she told him that she wanted to end their relationship.
But Geer was not suspected of any violent offense and had no known criminal record. The Inquisitr previously reported on the John Geer shooting, in a story that can be accessed at this link.
On Friday, January 30, following a judge’s order, Fairfax County released 11,000 pages of documents related to the John Geer shooting, including audio of interviews with Rodney Barnes and Adam Torres.
