Prosecutor: Officers too often claim self-defense
One week into his term as Franklin County’s new prosecutor, Gary Tyack is considering whether his office should take back handling any case involving a former Columbus police officer who was fired within days of fatally shooting an unarmed Black man.
In an interview with The Dispatch, Tyack expressed concerns about the circumstances surrounding the Dec. 22 shooting, which led to the death of 47-year-old Andre Hill.
“I think for years and years, some police have felt they had immunity as long as they told a story about how they shot someone in self-defense,” said Tyack, a Democrat who defeated longtime Republican incumbent prosecutor Ron O’brien in the November election.
“That’s what you hear about the cases pending now,” Tyack said. “The claim is, ‘What I did was in self-defense.’ You know, ‘His hand wasn’t visible to me, and his hand had a cellphone in it, but since I couldn’t see one of his hands, I decided he was armed and therefore I needed to shoot.’ I’m sorry, we can’t let officers keep getting away with that.”
Tyack was referring specifically to the actions of former Columbus police officer Adam Coy, a 19-year veteran of the force who shot Hill multiple times around 1:50 a.m. as Hill emerged from a darkened garage at a Northwest Side home. The shooting was captured on Coy’s body camera, without audio, and shows Hill being shot within seconds of him walking to the open garage door, holding an illuminated cellphone in his raised left hand.
Officer Amy Detweiler, who responded with Coy to what had been a neighbor’s nonemergency disturbance complaint about a noisy vehicle, told investigators that immediately before Coy shot Hill she heard Coy yell: “There’s a gun in his other hand, there’s a gun in his other hand!”
Police later determined that Hill was not armed and was a guest at the home, stopping there to drop off money for Christmas presents for the children of a woman who resides there.
Columbus Safety Director Ned Pettus fired Coy six days after Hill’s death, declaring that the shooting did not appear to be “objectively reasonable.”
“I don’t want to prejudice the prosecution of the case, but I for one can’t quite understand why a gun was fired,” Tyack said.
Just days before leaving office, O’brien filed a motion in Common Pleas
Court appointing the Ohio Attorney General’s office to handle any prosecution of the Hill shooting. The attorney general’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) is already handling the investigation of the incident at the city’s request.
Tyack said he hasn’t decided if he will seek to have O’brien’s motion rescinded and have his office take over responsibility for presenting the case to a grand jury and handling any prosecution.
“If BCI is doing work on forensics and other stuff, then the question is, can the county prosecutor step in and take that back?” he said. “Is that even wise, where one agency has been pursuing it, to take it away from that agency?”
Tyack, 74, a retired 10th District (Franklin County) Appeals Court judge, campaigned on a promise that he would be more likely than O’brien to seek indictments of officers in fatal use-offorce cases and other allegations of misconduct.
That position, along with many of the comments he made about police shootings during the campaign, has raised concerns among law enforcement officers that Tyack will be biased against officers in such cases.
The concerns were heightened when Tyack said during a recent TV interview that “we need to get the message out that if you do succumb to the temptation to shoot, then we will end up penalizing you, maybe even sending you to prison.”
Tyack didn’t back away from the statement when asked by The Dispatch about the concerns it raised.
“I said exactly what I meant to say,” he said. “I don’t stutter. I don’t think I’m hard to understand.”
Keith Ferrell, president of FOP Capital City Lodge No. 9, which represents more than 4,000 law enforcement officers from Columbus and more than 25 other agencies, said he is still waiting for an explanation of what Tyack meant.
“I would expect the prosecutor to follow the law,” he said. “The Fraternal Order of Police believes in accountability for police and the community. We expect the legal process to play out.”
Part of that, he said, is having “an impartial prosecutor who simply deals in facts.”
Tyack disputed the notion that he will be unfair to police officers.
“I have no interest ... to pursue a police officer because they draw a paycheck from a police agency,” he said. “Having said that, I have no desire, especially given the concerns in some of the minority communities, to avoid charging people who have shot members of the community without justifiable cause.”
Tyack said he doesn’t expect to make wholesale changes in the prosecutor’s office, which employs more than 100 lawyers, but he did ask for the resignations of some of O’brien’s highest ranking and most experienced assistant prosecutors. They include James Lowe, head of the criminal division, who had been handling the high-profile murder charges against Mount Carmel Health emergency room Dr. William Husel with O’brien; and Steve Taylor, head of the appeals division; and Nancy Moore, chief counsel.
Among the replacements Tyack has hired are Janet Grubb, a former Franklin County Municipal Court judge, to head up the criminal division, and Jeanine Hummer, former Upper Arlington city attorney, to lead the civil division.
Tyack said he expects to serve as administrator of the office, rather than taking an active role as a courtroom prosecutor, as O’brien did.
The decision is strictly a personal preference, Tyack said, and is unrelated to his ongoing recovery from a stroke he suffered weeks before the Nov. 3 election.
Tyack is using a wheelchair or a walker as he continues physical therapy sessions in an effort to regain full use of his right side. His recovery isn’t happening as quickly as he had hoped, but “I’m getting stronger day by day,” he said.
“And there is nothing wrong with my brain. There’s no reason to think I am in any way inhibited from doing the job.”
Yet Tyack has faced weeks of rumors that he will step down early in his fouryear term and let county commissioners select a replacement.
“That’s absolutely not true,” Tyack said. “I can say without doubt I am the prosecutor, I’m going to be the prosecutor for the foreseeable future, and it will probably be four years or more.” jfutty@dispatch.com @johnfutty