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Columbine motion accuses cop of killing
Josey1
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Columbine motion accuses cop of killingDenver officer named in bid for reinstatement of Rohrbough family's caseBy Mike McPhee Denver Post Staff WriterThursday, December 27, 2001 - An explosive motion, filed Wednesday in federal court, names a Denver police officer as the killer of Columbine High School student Daniel Rohrbough. Attorney Barry Arrington, who represents five of the Columbine victims' families, named Sgt. Dan O'Shea - a member of the SWAT team during the April 20, 1999, shootings - as the person who shot and killed Rohrbough as he fled the massacre inside. According to the filing, O'Shea broke down in tears two days after the shootings, telling a school administrator "he hadn't slept in days because he may have shot an innocent student." The motion also accuses Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone and his department of making 29 "blatant, bald-faced lies about the investigation during the past three years." Arrington listed all 29 incidents in a left-hand column, then wrote what he believes are the true events in a right-hand column, opposite each accusation. In asking U.S. District Chief Judge Lewis Babcock to reconsider his dismissal of the Rohrbough lawsuit, Arrington concluded that Stone's actions were part of a "cynical, preconceived and purposefully executed plan designed to frustrate both the media's and the victims' families' efforts to uncover the truth. O'Shea - now assigned to the 16th Street Mall - could not be reached for comment. Denver Deputy Police Chief Dave Abrams said Wednesday night that he was unaware of the accusation against O'Shea. "I think it's unlikely," he said of the possibility that O'Shea shot Daniel Rohrbough at Columbine. "I would seriously doubt it." Brian Rohrbough, Daniel's father, said Wednesday, "Obviously we're thankful that someone has come forward with information that allows us to link which police officer shot Dan. This fills in all the gaps in the information we've had to allow us to say, first, that O'Shea is the guy who did it but, more importantly, that he has said he's the guy who did it." Arrington said recent publicity about the Columbine case and the dismissal of eight of the nine Columbine lawsuits motivated Jefferson County School District administrator Celine Marquez to come forward with more information. Arrington states that Marquez, 47, was visiting Jefferson County preschools two days after the massacre when she encountered O'Shea and his wife in Westridge Elementary School, where their daughter is in preschool. O'Shea had brought flowers to thank the school for keeping his daughter late on the day of the massacre. O'Shea said he was going to pick up his daughter at 11:30 a.m. when he was dispatched to Columbine. According to the motion, Marquez thanked O'Shea for responding to the school because she had two children at the high school. O'Shea broke down crying, the motion states. He allegedly said that he may have mistakenly shot an innocent student but that he was relieved because just that morning, April 22, he had been told that ballistics tests proved that none of the victims had been struck by police bullets. Arrington said Wednesday that "someone told Sgt. O'Shea a grievous lie," because none of the bullets had been turned over for ballistics tests by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation until May 5, 1999. Arrington states that O'Shea's handwritten police report has him shooting a 9mm machine gun from the base of a hill on which Rohrbough was shot and killed. Numerous 9mm shell casings were found near where O'Shea said he stood and fired. According to the motion, Rohrbough's autopsy report stated that there were two entry wounds "in the left front shirt sleeve and one in the lower left front abdomen . . . This finding matches with Daniel Rohrbough facing downhill and Sgt. O'Shea firing from below." His fatal wound "was consistent with a 9mm," according to the motion. And a bullet fragment was located behind and uphill from Rohrbough's body "exactly where one would expect it to be if he were shot from the front and below." Additionally, Jefferson County Sheriff's Deputy Jim Taylor said that once he took up a position on the perimeter, he "specifically remembers that when he arrived in the lower student parking lot, a Denver police officer was there somewhere to his left, and he remembers hearing the sound of machine gun fire," according to the motion. "Deputy Taylor saw a boy (whom he later was able to identify as Daniel Rohrbough) running at a fast trot down the sidewalk with a group of children, and he saw this boy get shot and drop to the ground," the motion states. The motion states that Rohrbough was killed after the initial flurry of action and after the decision was made to set up a perimeter. "From his position in this defensive perimeter, Sgt. O'Shea clearly had an opportunity to reflect and deliberate; yet with a reckless and shocking indifference to the rights of Daniel Rohrbough, a student fleeing for his life with a group of other students, he shot and killed him." The motion states that O'Shea fired 51 rounds, one-third of all the law-enforcement shots fired. The motion also states that Jefferson County Sheriff's Deputy Annette Walker, who arrived at the scene late, told Rohrbough's mother that she saw Daniel alive and holding a door to the school open as other students escaped. "Ms. Walker's statement completely undermines the official report's claim that Daniel was shot dead before any law enforcement officer arrived," the motion states. Arrington then moved on to castigate the entire investigation. "Sheriff Stone has chosen to pursue a course of obstruction, delay and stonewalling that amounts to a whitewash at best and an outright cover-up at worst." He said Stone had one tactic of "distribution of outright and demonstrably false information about law enforcement actions . . . and concealing, denying the existence of, destroying or otherwise hindering the release of accurate information about the events in question." He then listed 29 statements by the sheriff that he termed lies. They include: Although the Sheriff's Office positively identified a bullet recovered from Rohrbough's body as having come from shooter Dylan Klebold's weapon, the office now admits positively the bullet did not come from Klebold's weapon and, in fact, was never identified. The Sheriff's Office adamantly denied that a search warrant affidavit had ever been written, but later admitted under order from Jefferson County Court that it had been drafted. The Sheriff's Office had said that all victims had been killed or injured before law enforcement arrived on the scene, but now Deputy Jim Taylor admits he was on the perimeter when he saw Daniel Rohrbough shot and killed. The victims' families were told the bodies were left at the scene for 24 hours because they might have been booby-trapped, but, in fact, news footage shows an officer rolling Rohrbough's body over shortly after the shooting. No booby traps were ever found. School resource officer Jim Gardner was said to have fired eight shots at shooter Eric Harris near the west doors of the school, while, in fact, three of the bullets found in the library were from Gardner's weapon. "It is impossible for stray bullets aimed at the west doors to wind up in the library," the motion states. "Nothing short of a wholesale reappraisal of the facts, including especially the officials' timeline, is necessary. Something happened on April 20, 1999, or the months leading up to that date that Sheriff John Stone desperately wants to hide." Denver Post Staff writer Marilyn Robinson contributed to this report. http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1002,54%7E298760,00.html
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