Felipe Rodriguez, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former detective sergeant for the New York City Police Department, slammed the officers who interviewed [mass killer Colt] Gray.
“They walked in there like it was their first day out of the academy,” said Rodriguez of the way the deputies took what the 13-year-old said at face value. “Good cops get facts and you corroborate it. When you don’t corroborate it, that’s when you drop the ball and then we look like idiots.”
A crucial failure, he said, was not getting into the house where they could have verified the elder Gray’s guns were inaccessible or checked the house for cleanliness and whether there was enough food – red flags that would have prompted a call to child services.
[The] officers failed to ask either Gray for details on their answers or present the elder Gray with facts concerning the family’s own run-ins with the law, from 911 calls to an eviction a year earlier.
Rodriguez also said Colt fit the profile of a mass shooter: a young, white, male, loner.
“We’re getting mass shooters left and right, you have to do whatever you can,” Rodriguez said. Instead, “they were talking and joshing like the kid stole a cupcake.”
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A photograph of the encounter shows the father wearing a humongous cross on his chest – could the “idiots” have done what George Bush did with Vladimir Putin, and assume that anyone who wears a big cross is too Christian to do anything naughty?