Documents shed light on trial of Mitchell
Warrants unsealed in ex-vice officer’s case
New details in a recently unsealed federal search warrant application show a former Columbus police vice officer was suspected of attempting to tamper with witnesses in his upcoming federal trial and was known among some sex workers for being dangerous.
Andrew Mitchell, 59, faces nine federal charges related to allegations he forced multiple women to engage in sexual acts in exchange for not arresting them for prostitution, as well as lying to the FBI. That trial is currently scheduled to occur in July in U.S. District Court.
Documents provided to The Dispatch and filed in U.S. District Court show that in September 2018 and April 2019, federal investigators filed search warrants in an effort to get information from Facebook on accounts Mitchell was using. The documents were unsealed last week.
The documents outline for the first time, in detail, the accounts of the two women whose allegations ultimately led to the criminal charges against Mitchell in federal court.
Those women’s accounts will not be heard by a Franklin County jury that will be picked in April to handle Mitchell’s retrial on murder and voluntary manslaughter charges in connection with the Aug. 23, 2018 shooting of Donna Dalton Castleberry.
The jury who heard Mitchell’s case the first time it went to trial in April 2022 also did not hear about the pending federal charges or the accounts of the other women.
Mitchell had been set to go back to trial in Franklin County Common Pleas Court this week on murder and voluntary manslaughter charges related to the Aug. 23, 2018, shooting death of 23-year-old Donna Dalton Castleberry. That trial has now been moved to April due to a scheduling conflict involving one of the attorneys on the case.
The first trial for Mitchell, which took place in April 2022, ended in a mistrial after the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict.
The Franklin County jury at that time was not allowed to be told about the federal charges against Mitchell or that, according to the recently unsealed documents, Columbus police were aware of an allegation of forced
sex involving another unidentified woman eight days before Castleberry was shot. A separate internal affairs complaint had been filed on Aug. 8, 2018 against Mitchell.
Mitchell was not relieved of his duties or moved to desk duty while the investigation of the complaint by the police division’s Special Victims Bureau was pending, which a police-provided timeline said began on Aug. 17, 2018.
On an audio recording Mitchell secretly made on a cellphone of the encounter with Castleberry, the 23-yearold can be heard saying she’d heard about Mitchell and tells Mitchell numerous times not to touch her. A video from a nearby surveillance camera shows Mitchell drove his unmarked police vehicle along the side of an apartment building in such a way that the passenger-side doors could not be opened. Castleberry is shown throwing a pair of handcuffs out the passenger side window moments before she was shot.
Mitchell has maintained that shooting Castleberry was justified because she stabbed him in the hand during an altercation inside the car. Mitchell’s injury required surgery and a blood transfusion.
What did Mitchell’s accusers tell federal investigators?
Both women involved in the federal case told investigators Mitchell had identified himself as a police officer when he picked them up while they were sex workers on the West Side. Mitchell asked each woman if they had active warrants for their arrest.
The first woman told to investigators that Mitchell used handcuffs to secure her to a “grab bar” inside the vehicle Mitchell was in, which was different each of the two times the woman said Mitchell picked her up. Mitchell also reportedly told the woman that no one would believe her if she reported him.
The first incident occurred in Lindbergh Park near the Wedgewood Village Apartments inside a medium-sized SUV with a leather interior and the second incident occurred at Berliner Park inside a black four-door “nicer car” with a leather interior, tinted windows and nice stereo system, according to the affidavit. The woman took investigators to both locations and became visibly distraught, even dry heaving, when going to Berliner Park with the investigators, documents show.
Investigators wrote in the affidavit that Mitchell’s wife had a Lincoln Navigator registered in her name that had “significant similarities” to the vehicle the woman described. Mitchell also owned a Cadillac XTS with tinted windows.
The second woman described a similar dark-colored four-door sedan that Mitchell was driving when he picked her up in the summer of 2017. She told investigators that Mitchell had used metal handcuffs and a zip tie to immobilize her with both secured to the car’s door handle.
She said that Mitchell drove her to a “secluded parking lot” on the city’s Far West Side behind a bar with multiple dumpsters, telling her that there were not many cameras in the area which made it a “good location.” The woman said Mitchell had initially said he would pay her but did not, instead dropping her off at an ex-boyfriend’s home.
One of the women told investigators she remembered that one of Mitchell’s fingers appeared to have an indentation on it, similar to what would be visible if someone took off a ring they had been wearing for a long period of time.
Both women picked Mitchell out of a photo lineup before his photograph was widely circulated online or in local media, according to the affidavits.
What other evidence do investigators say they have?
In the summer of 2018, a third woman reportedly told a community outreach worker, after being arrested in a Columbus police Vice Unit sting operation, that Mitchell had been “one of her first tricks” when she began working on the street a few years earlier.
This allegation was provided to police on Aug. 15, 2018, according to the affidavit — eight days before Mitchell fatally shot Castleberry while working undercover in an unmarked police car.
The affidavit for one of the search warrants also lists a number of other search warrants that federal investigators had executed to gather evidence in the case, including Mitchell’s home, vehicles belong to both him and his wife, items from Mitchell’s work desk, cellphone data and information from Mitchell’s icloud account.
Federal investigators had also used cellphone tracking on Mitchell’s personal phone, a suspected burner phone he was using and another cellphone belonging to an unidentified third party Mitchell was alleged to have asked to reach out to possible witnesses on his behalf. The affidavit details that Mitchell’s cellphone was at the homes of several witnesses or relatives of witnesses while the investigation was taking place.
In one instance, Mitchell’s cellphone was at the location a witness had been dropped off at by investigators after that witness admitted to speaking with Mitchell the previous day, refused to testify before a federal grand jury and asked for a lawyer. Mitchell’s cellphone was at the location within two hours of the witness being dropped off by federal investigators.
At least two other witnesses told investigators and a federal grand jury that Mitchell had spoken with them prior to their interviews, encouraging them to tell the truth but leave out that Mitchell had paid them for performing sexual acts, according to the affidavit. bbruner@dispatch.com @bethany_bruner