This story isn’t about Renatta Frazier or Rickey Davis. The long-awaited and much-anticipated report on the Springfield Police Department’s treatment of those two African-American officers (one resigned, one still hanging in there) is due to be delivered to the City Council at the exact same hour Illinois Times goes to press. It’s a coincidence that makes it impossible for this paper to report anything the four Husch & Eppenberger lawyers might have uncovered in their five-month investigation of these cases.
Frazier was the subject of a salacious and erroneous report SPD allowed to be publicized throughout the media for almost a year. She eventually resigned from the force, citing stress and racial hostility. Davis is a lieutenant who discovered internal affairs officers following him and claimed harassment. Husch & Eppenberger is the Peoria law firm the city hired in November to spend three weeks looking into the department.
Meanwhile, SPD has continued to demonstrate creativity in its personnel decisions with the recent reinstatement of fired officer Rob Fleck. Fleck, a six-year veteran, was quietly called back to duty March 24 and received written confirmation that he was reinstated in a memo dated March 25.
Fleck and another SPD officer, Mark Terlecki, were fired in February 2002 for their handling of a suspected drug dealer at the Hilton. Within weeks, the Illinois State Police and the state’s attorney’s office cleared them of any potential criminal charges. Last month, an arbitrator ruled that the two officers had made mistakes and deserved punishment but not termination. Terlecki was immediately reinstated. Fleck, however, was still out of a job.
Fleck, it turns out, had been fired twice on the same day back in January 2002–for the September 2001 incident with the suspected drug dealer, and for calling in sick two days in August 2001 during the Illinois State Fair.
Forbidden by department policy from speaking with the media, Fleck declined to speculate on why he was fired for calling in sick. But Don Kliment, president of the Policemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association No. 5, tells a tale that makes this firing even more curious. Just days after the arbitrator ruled Fleck should be reinstated on the Hilton incident, SPD’s attorney threatened to charge Fleck with perjury, Kliment says.
Kliment and another union board member were in a meeting with William G. Workman, assistant corporation counsel assigned to the police department, when Workman presented two options: The department would say Fleck was being suspended for misuse of sick leave and Fleck would then be “allowed to resign,” or he would be charged with perjury for testimony in a federal court trial last summer. Workman told Kliment transcripts of the trial had already been ordered, in preparation for the perjury charge.
“I told Workman I didn’t even have to ask Fleck; I knew he would turn down that deal,” Kliment says. “There was no perjury. I told Workman it sounded like extortion to me.”
Workman isn’t commenting. “These are internal affairs matters and I can’t talk about those,” he says.
But Kliment as well as Fleck’s wife, Kathie, believe the officer’s problems with the department stem from his involvement in the so-called “Office Tavern” incident back in January 1999. In that now-infamous event, a group of off-duty SPD officers had gathered at the Office Sports Bar and Grill-North to celebrate a family member’s birthday. Another patron at the bar, Curt McCloughan, backed into an officer’s truck in the parking lot and was subsequently pulled from his vehicle and beaten by several of the off-duty officers. One officer, Dan Patterson, was eventually fired by SPD and charged with the beating. He was later acquitted by a jury and then reinstated after an arbitrator’s ruling.
Fleck’s role in the Office Tavern incident was described by witnesses mainly as trying to stop the fight and calm the participants. He telephoned on-duty police to come to the scene, then waited until they arrived, according to his wife. “I actually went home with the Pattersons,” Kathie recalls. “Rob was like the last person to leave, and he was disciplined for not doing enough.”
As events unfolded, Fleck would also be the first officer officially questioned about the incident. Sometime in the first two weeks of February, Kathie says, her husband learned that his brother in Florida was dying of a brain tumor. The department gave Fleck permission to go to Florida, Kathie recalls, provided that Fleck would first talk to the department’s “major case” investigators about what happened at Office Tavern. Fleck complied, and then left. His brother died about a week later.
Fleck later testified against Patterson at several hearings, saying he saw Patterson kick McCloughan. But apparently, his testimony didn’t describe the incident exactly as the department had hoped. Fleck’s wife believes police chief John Harris has had a vendetta against him ever since.
“I think they were mad because he would not make their case against Patterson,” Kathie Fleck says. “They didn’t get the evidence they needed, so Dan [Patterson] got off, which meant that the Chief couldn’t get rid of his problem.”
SPD’s public information officer, Sergeant Kevin Keen, says if Workman can’t comment he can’t either.
Fleck again found himself in trouble with the department in the fall of 2001. Internal affairs launched an investigation into a complaint filed by the mother of a suspected drug dealer Fleck and Terlecki had encountered at the Hilton on September 29, 2001.
At 2:22 that morning, the two officers were dispatched to the top floor of the Hilton, where, in a public restroom, a brand new Illinois State Police academy graduate was standing proudly over a pair of young men, believing he had made his first drug bust. He had found what Fleck’s wife says was “a miniscule amount” of a crumbly yellow substance wrapped in cellophane in one man’s pocket.
According to the account given in the subsequent arbitration ruling, Fleck and Terlecki took the two suspects to a parking lot several blocks away and tested the substance twice using kits Terlecki had in his car.
The result is a matter of controversey. According to the arbitration ruling, both officers said the substance tested negative. But one of the suspects–cuffed in the back seat of Fleck’s car, looking through a screen, yards away from the test in the dark–said he saw the test turn blue.
What’s not disputed is that Fleck then poured the substance on the ground, stepped on it, and dumped his bottle of water over it. Having no reason to hold them (he believed the test was negative), he sent the two suspects on their way.
But a day or so later, SPD got a call from the mother of one of the suspects. Her son told her Fleck and Terlecki had taken his drugs and $400 to $500 cash. The mom–who later said her son was alcoholic, drug addicted, and prone to lying–filed a complaint with internal affairs.
Within hours, Fleck and Terlecki were put on administrative leave. At the end of January 2002, both officers were fired. Even Kathie Fleck says her husband admits he made some “stupid decisions” that night.
More than a year later, an arbitrator ruled that the two officers’ conduct, “from their arrival at the Hilton until they released [the two suspects] and disposed of the cocaine and test kits was egregious.” Throwing the test kits in the garbage can was “foolhardy” and “triggered the chain of events allowing the integrity of the Department. . . to be called into question, albeit through a person who repeatedly admitted to engaging in criminal conduct.”
The suspect, according to the arbitrator, was “just plain unbelievable,” spinning a yarn about having an ounce of cocaine that he both used and distributed over a period of several days–a feat the arbitrator wrote was “as amazing as the parable about the multiplication of the loaves.”
In the end, the arbitrator said the city was justified in issuing “substantial discipline” to the two officers, but not to terminate them. Both officers lost more than a year’s salary.
Terlecki was immediately reinstated. Fleck, though, had also been fired for “misuse of sick time.” That incident seemed so inconsequential, Kathie Fleck has a hard time recalling details.
Kliment says the department traditionally “freezes manning” during the Illinois State Fair, denying all requests for vacation time, comp time, or sick time. It was common knowledge, though, that Fleck wanted time off to attend his high school reunion (Lanphier High School’s class of 1981). And he did attend a couple of daytime events, Kathie says, without having to miss work, because he worked the midnight shift.
So a few weeks after Fleck called in sick on September 11,2001, he was summoned to a supervisor’s office and questioned about the two days he called in sick. Kathie says her husband told the truth: Yes, he attended some reunion events. But when he called in sick, he was home with their then-six-year-old daughter, Pekaboo, who has chronic lung problems due to being born prematurely. Kathie was working for a vendor at the State Fair.
Kliment says the department never even called Fleck to see whether he was actually home during his duty hours. “They have no evidence that he misused sick time,” Kliment says.
Kathie Fleck says all these suspensions and punishments have caused the cheerful, upbeat prankster she married to all but disappear.
“He’s not happy–he’s not the same person,” she says. “This has been two years of Hell. It’s been terrible. These are people that he’s worked with, that he would die for. It just kills me.”
Even though he is now back at work, Kathie says, her husband has become paranoid, afraid of his fellow officers, fearful that he’s being followed and watched.
Sound familiar? Maybe he should talk to Rickey Davis. u
This article appears in Apr 3-9, 2003.
