No DUI charges for officer

Police did not investigate the incident; DA Brauchler says he thinks Nate Meier received special treatment

Medical paperwork shows an Aurora officer’s blood-alcohol content was five times the legal limit when he was found passed out drunk in his department car. He confessed to internal affairs investigators that he was driving drunk. And officers on the scene noted at the time that he smelled of booze.

But Officer Nate Meier will not face DUI charges — or any other criminal counts — for the March 26 incident because the Aurora Police Department never investigated the incident as a possible crime and a series of laws prevents that evidence from being used at a trial, 18th Judicial District Attorney George Brauchler said at a news conference Thursday.

“If one of us had been in that car and not Officer Nate Meier, do I think this would this have been treated differently? I do,” Brauchler said.

The controversy that followed after the case became public marred the final months of former Aurora Police Chief Nick Metz’s tenure and prompted his second in command, Deputy Chief Paul

O’Keefe, to renounce his plans to serve as interim police chief and retire instead.

O’Keefe announced Thursday afternoon that he would resign Friday, Crystal McCoy, an Aurora police spokeswoman, confirmed in an email to The Denver Post. His decision to leave early came moments after interim Police Chief Vanessa Wilson told the media she would open an internal investigation into O’Keefe’s handling of the Meier case. McCoy said the internal investigation will continue.

In an interview Thursday with The Denver Post, Wilson said, “We did this wrong. We did it wrong by not holding that to the criminal standard.”

Wilson said she cannot change the disciplinary decision already handed to Meier, but she has made it mandatory that any officer suspected of on-duty substance abuse be subject to an internal investigation. “We’ve let the community down and they’re angry,” she said. “I get it.”

Brauchler, whose office works hand in hand with Aurora police on thousands of cases, said the blood test could not be admitted because it was it was taken as part of a medical examination, which he cannot compel the hospital or Meier to give him. The comments Meier made to internal affairs investigators is barred from use in criminal proceedings because a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court ruling mandates that statements public employees are forced to make as part of internal investigations cannot be used against them in court.

Without those keys pieces of information, Brauchler said he didn’t think he had enough evidence to bring a case with a likelihood of conviction. Other potential evidence was not tested or is incomplete. For example, a water bottle filled with a clear liquid was found in Meier’s car, but nobody tested the liquid to see if it was alcohol, Brauchler said. Officers who responded to the scene turned their body cameras on and off and one officer’s camera wasn’t functioning.

“What we have right now with the evidence is an unexplained issue of bad driving and a fleeting, faint smell of alcohol,” he said. “I don’t think that’s enough.”

Brauchler said that if he had more evidence, Meier could have faced charges of DUI, driving while impaired, prohibited use of a weapon, reckless endangerment and official misconduct. He said medical records showed Meier’s blood-alcohol content was 0.43% at the time of the incident.

The prosecutor said he also looked into whether any other Aurora police officials could be charged with official misconduct, but said he didn’t think any charges were possible with the information known now.

“I was desperate to find ways to move forward on this case,” he said.

Investigators with the district attorney’s office attempted to interview Meier, but he declined through his lawyer, Brauchler said.

Brauchler expressed frustration that the Aurora Police Department did not investigate the incident as a possible DUI. Officers could have drawn Meier’s blood, even if he were unconscious, had they wanted to. Brauchler’s office didn’t learn of the March 29 incident until December, when it was reported by Denver CBS4.

“It is our opinion that there was probable cause to seek a sample of blood from Meier,” a letter from the district attorney’s office outlining the decision states. “Had anyone from APD called us, as they routinely do, to discuss whether probable cause existed, we would have told them we believed it did. No such call was made.”

Meier kept his job after the incident, though he was demoted and was suspended without pay.

The incident began when two people called 911 after seeing a man unconscious in the driver’s seat of an unmarked car in the middle of East Mississippi Avenue, according to internal affairs documents. The car was running and in gear, though Meier’s foot on the brake kept it from moving.

O’Keefe was the first officer to arrive on scene. He banged on the window and could see Meier trying to focus on the noise, but the officer didn’t respond otherwise, O’Keefe wrote in a report.

“His eyes were open slightly and his head rolled around as if he was trying to find some cause of the disturbance,” O’Keefe wrote. “He did not appear to be aware of his surroundings.”

Firefighters broke the window of the patrol car and Meier was transported to a hospital. Multiple officers, including O’Keefe, wrote in their reports that they smelled alcohol in the car or on Meier.

O’Keefe dispatched a patrol officer to the hospital to investigate the incident as a DUI, but later decided the event was a medical incident, not a crime. Multiple people in the command staff of the police department were part of the decision to call off the DUI investigator, said Chief Deputy District Attorney Brian Sugioka, who led the prosecutors’ investigation.

In the internal affairs files reviewed by Sugioka, O’Keefe stated that he “made the call” to not investigate the incident as a DUI because he didn’t think there was enough evidence indicating Meier was drunk. He told internal affairs investigators that he “erred on the side of protecting (Meier),” according to a letter from the prosecutors’ office outlining the case.

Meier later told internal affairs investigators that he drank vodka during his shift and that he had no memory of what happened that day because he blacked out.

On Thursday, Aurora City Manager Jim Twombly, who has hired former U.S. Attorney John Walsh to review how the police department handled the incident and how Meier was disciplined, said he hoped to restore the community’s trust in the department.

“There were questionable decisions made at the scene that failed our residents, failed our many hardworking police officers, and failed our city,” Twombly said in a statement. “This incident falls far short of the standards of accountability and integrity we expect of all city employees and has jeopardized our strong relationship with our residents. But that relationship is not irrevocably broken.”