Video shows informant interview
Leaked footage reveals Baltimore police had tip on Suiter fatal shooting
Leaked video shows Baltimore homicide detectives interviewed an informant who described the death of Detective Sean Suiter as a homicide and identified a lead on a possible suspect.
The video, obtained by WMAR, shows a man telling detectives an account of someone getting into a struggle with and shooting a man who they later learned was Suiter. He told police the information was secondhand.
“This was before we even know that there was a police, that s--- in the news or whatever,” the man on the video tells detectives. “He said ... the detective dude started to walk over and walk over top and he looked up and he saw a n---- with a gun or whatever, so he went for it or whatever, and that was the outcome.”
WMAR reported that the man said he knew the name of the man who told him the story, but that he never got the name of the person who did the shooting.
The Police Department said in a statement that the man’s information wasn’t credible, but declined to explain in detail.
The man’s tip has not previously been described by officials or in the Independent Review Board report, which concluded that Suiter likely took his own life.
Suiter’s death was officially ruled a homicide in the days after his death. He was shot the day before he was to testify before a federal grand jury investigating corruption within Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force. Since then, some investigators began to believe that the evidence suggested Suiter committed suicide and staged it to look like he had been killed, and the independent panel’s review of the evidence settled on the most likely scenario.
Suiter’s family and his attorney, along with some of the slain detective’s colleagues in the Police Department, reject that finding, and say the panel overlooked important evidence.
Attorney Jeremy Eldridge said the video raised important questions about the quality of the investigation and the amount of information the review panel was provided.
“A tip with this specificity is incredibly concerning,” he said. “This information was provided by a key witness in a federal prosecution. If this information wasn’t vetted by the BPD, it means they didn’t investigate the murder of one of its own, and it owes Sean’s family some very candid answers about why.”
The Police Department received 54 tips that they followed up on, according to the Independent Review Board. A memo provided by the Police Department to the panel “noted that all leads had been exhausted, and there were no suspects, nor had any charges been brought.”
WMAR identified the man in the leaked video as a confidential informant who was used as a government witness in the recent major federal trial of a gang called “Trained To Go,” which federal prosecutors said was behind a slew of killings.
The state’s attorney’s office declined to comment Thursday night about the leaked video.