Vin Suprynowicz

John Geer was killed a year and a half ago, but it wasn’t until a judge ordered officials in Fairfax County, Virginia, to release 11,000 pages of documents earlier this year, detailing their 17-month cover-up of the case, that details of his homicide by police became known.

Owner of a local kitchen design business in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, John B. Geer, 46, stood with his hands on top of the storm door of his Springfield, Va., townhouse in broad daylight and calmly told four Fairfax County police officers who had their handguns pointed at him: “I don’t want anybody to get shot. . . . And I don’t wanna get shot, ’cause I don’t want to die today,” reported Tom Jackman of the Washington Post on Jan. 31.

How and why Geer died that afternoon in August, 2013, after police responded to a reported domestic dispute at his home, remained a mystery for 17 months. But the documents released Jan. 30 “paint a vivid picture of a tense 44-minute showdown,” Jackman of the Post reports, after officers were called by Geer’s live-in partner of 24 years, Maura Harrington, another woman who has now learned what can happen if you seek police help with a non-violent domestic dispute.

The files also reveal for the first time why the Fairfax prosecutor shifted the case to the U.S. attorney’s office: an internal affairs investigation into a loud, angry “meltdown” suffered earlier by the shooter, officer Adam Torres, in the Fairfax County Courthouse. In that incident, five months before the Geer shooting, Torres repeatedly cursed an assistant county prosecutor who said there were problems with Torres’ investigation of a drunk-driving case, and stormed out of the courthouse.

But county police refused to make the internal affairs file of that incident available to Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond Morrogh, the Post reports. A frustrated Morrogh, unable to get anywhere with his own police department, then asked federal authorities to take the case.

Geer and Harrington, who had two daughters together, had had an argument over the phone that day, and Geer had begun throwing some of Harrington’s belongings onto their front yard. Harrington came home and dialed 911.

When Torres, 30, and Officer David Neil arrived, Geer immediately turned and walked inside the townhouse. As the officers approached, Geer held up a holstered handgun and, according to both officers, said, “I have a gun; I will use it if I need to because you guys have guns.”

Torres quickly ducked behind a tree 17 feet from the front door, pulled his gun and aimed at Geer. Neil pulled his gun but kept it pointed down. Geer soon placed his holstered gun on the ground, and no officer saw it again, according to their statements.

Five minutes later, Officer Rodney Barnes arrived. Barnes, 49, was a trained negotiator. He began to develop a rapport with Geer.

‘NOBODY’S GOING TO SHOOT YOU’

Neil McDonald, senior Washington, D.C. correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, picked up the account in his Feb. 18 column:

“Asked whether Geer had weapons, his common-law wife answered yes, but they were legally owned and secured. No, he hadn’t been drinking.

“Barnes asked Geer if he owned a pistol. Geer said yes, and fetched it. He held it up, holstered, for Barnes to see and set it aside, raising his hands again. He offered to let Barnes come into the house and retrieve the weapon.

“He asked for permission to scratch his nose, Barnes said, and did it slowly, then raised his hands again. He asked to reach into his pocket for his phone; Barnes asked him not to, and he obeyed.

“He said ‘I know if I reach down or drop my hands I can get shot,” Barnes told detectives later. “I said, hey, nobody’s going to shoot you. . . .”

But Geer pointed to one nearby officer in particular, Adam Torres, who kept raising his pistol from the “ready” position (pointed at Geer’s legs) to Geer’s chest.

“Please ask him not to point his gun at me,” Geer begged Barnes. Geer even offered to come out and be handcuffed if Torres and the other patrolmen would agree to move “way back.” Then he asked to scratch his nose again. Barnes consented. And Torres fired.

Geer, grabbing his wound, screamed in pain and stepped back, slamming his door closed.

“And I’m like, who the fuck shot?” Barnes told detectives later. “I kinda got a little pissed.”

Torres acknowledged it had been him. Then, unbidden, he told Barnes he’d had a fight over the phone with his wife just before arriving on the scene, McDonald of the CBC reports.

Police, unsure whether Geer was alive and armed, did not enter the house for 70 minutes, until a SWAT team arrived with an armored truck and battering ram, Jackman of the Post reports. “When the tactical officers entered, Geer was dead just inside the front door.”

Torres said he fired because Geer “brought both his hands down really quick near his waist.” But all the other officers at the scene agreed Geer’s “hands were up.”

Mark Lieberman, the Geer family lawyer, told reporters “It is hard to believe a Virginia state grand jury has not been presented with this information. . . . If this was a similar situation involving two ordinary citizens, there is little doubt that any individual who shot an unarmed man who was holding his hands up in the air and claiming that he did not want to hurt anyone would have been arrested and charged.”

“It’s not good,” Officer David Parker, who was crouching 15 feet behind Torres, told investigators. “He killed that guy and he didn’t have to.”

SHOULD POLICE BE EXEMPT FROM LAWS?

“The killing of John Geer should frighten everyone,” concludes Neil McDonald of the CBC.

Indeed. Our system of government does not envisage the populace supervised and occasionally culled with impunity by armor-clad para-military units not subject to the same laws as the rest of us.

If you or I draw a handgun and point it at someone, we’ve committed an indictable crime known as “assault.” If we then shoot an unarmed fellow-citizen who no reasonable person believes was seriously threatening bodily harm, prosecutors will generally assert we’ve committed a far more serious crime -– homicide, which a jury will be asked to label either manslaughter or murder, following an adversarial proceeding.

But police officers hardly ever face such public trials.

Should police be exempt from these laws? Well, there are certainly circumstances under which a police officer should not be charged, just as prosecutors have discretion not to charge you or me. If the person at whom we point our weapon is known to be a fleeing killer, for instance, who’s taken an innocent hostage and is threatening to kill again, any one of us might be found justified if we respond with armed force. (Though again, you or I, unlike police, would face strict scrutiny, would incur large legal fees, and would likely spend at least that night in jail -– please don’t try this at home.)

But our cops are killing a lot of unarmed fellow civilians these days, and a large part of the problem clearly is an us-versus-them mentality in which officers face no consequences for treating us -– even in our own homes -– as dangerous adversaries.

After John Geer was shot, police waited 70 minutes for him to bleed to death inside his house, until they could bring an armored vehicle to the scene to break down his door. In other words, they treated him — a man who attracted police attention by committing no “crime” but throwing some of his girlfriend’s clothes on his front lawn — as though he were some kind of deranged suicide bomber, a wailing terrorist with fifty pounds of explosive wrapped around his waist.

Police frequently say they have dangerous jobs. Their job that day — one for which they all volunteered, mind you — was to lessen the harm they’d already done by quickly entering John Geer’s home and offering him first aid, even at the risk of their own lives. But they didn’t do that, did they?

Disarm the populace, so we’d be even more at the mercy of these armed cowboys? I don’t think so. Not until the day when someone who has fatally shot a police officer says “I don’t care if no one else saw it; that cop made a furtive movement toward his waistband,” and prosecutors and investigating officers respond by saying, “Well, OK then, in that case we’re done here, Mr. Citizen; you’re free to go. Here, don’t forget to take your weapon with you, and your ammo. Nice shooting, pardner.”

Vin Suprynowicz, an award-winning 20-year former editorial writer for the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal, is the author of “Send in the Waco Killers,” “The Ballad of Carl Drega,” and the new novel, first of a series on the War on Drugs, “The Testament of James.” A version of this column appears in the April 10 edition of “Shotgun News.”