LITTLE ROCK — A former dispatcher for the West Memphis Police Department testified Monday that two summers ago, she pried officer Scott McCall’s hands off the neck of a handcuffed man who shouted that two recently slain officers were “pigs” who “got what they deserved.”
Debra Deweese testified as a federal witness-tampering trial against the department’s Internal Affairs investigator, Lester Ditto, entered its second week.
Ditto is accused of pressuring Deweese and another dispatcher, Mea Taylor, to lie about McCall’s actions in recorded statements he took from them during his internal investigation. The investigation began after barber Michael Young lodged a complaint that McCall choked him in the department’s lobby on June 14, 2010.
Young had gone to the department that evening to complain about a traffic citation his daughter received earlier that day.
He quickly became unruly and began cursing officers, and was arrested on a disorderly conduct charge, with his hands cuffed behind his back.
Officer Randy Lancaster, who cuffed him, then entered the dispatch room located just off the lobby, and asked that other officers be called to the station.
Deweese said she and Taylor soon heard angry voices in the lobby getting louder, and went to investigate.
“When we stepped out there, officer McCall had his hands around Mr. Young’s neck and was choking him,” she told Chiraag Bains, an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.
Just before that, she said, “Mr. Young was saying that the two slain officers got what they deserved. He was calling them pigs, and Officer McCall was saying they were his brothers.”
Less than a month earlier, on May 14, 2010, Sgt. Brandon Paudert, the chief’s son, and fellow officer Thomas “Bill” Evans, were shot dead during a traffic stop by two men who were killed later that day by other law enforcement officers during a shoot-out in a parking lot.
Deweese said Young, whose name she didn’t know at the time, couldn’t get away or fight back, so she and Taylor pulled McCall’s hands off the man’s neck, and then she placed her arms on McCall and marched him out of the lobby into the dispatch room.
“I told him this was not worth it,” she recalled.
A hidden camera in the dispatch room shows Deweese guiding McCall into the room, her hands firmly on his arms.
Although she didn’t know McCall well, and had never seen Young before, Deweese said she intervened because, “Nobody deserved that,” and she wanted “just to try to defuse the situation.”
“I am a motherly, nurturing type person, and that’s the way I would react to anybody,” she said.
The video shows Deweese, who had worked at the department for just six months, rubbing McCall’s arm reassuringly, before he glances at a video monitor and hurriedly runs out of the dispatch room. Deweese said the monitor showed that Young was in a hallway, trying to leave the department.
About two weeks later, Deweese told jurors, she sat across from Ditto in his closed office, and before he started his tape recorder, “We had a conversation about the incident. I told him the truth - that Mr. McCall was choking Mr. Young.”
She said Ditto then began talking to her.
“From the conversation, I assumed he wanted me to change the truth, because he said we had a good officer on this side and a not-nice, evil person on the other side, and who did I want to see prevail? ... He also said there were no cameras in the lobby area.”
Asked if Ditto directly asked her to lie, she said, “He did not outright say it, but I felt like if I didn’t, that my job would be in jeopardy.”
Deweese testified, “My husband had just been diagnosed with cancer,” and that she was suddenly the sole breadwinner in a newly purchased house, while medical bills were piling up.
So when the tape recorder started, “I changed my story to where Officer McCall had put his hands on Mr. Young’s shoulders to force him back down into the chair.”
After the audiotape was played in the courtroom, Deweese told jurors that while it was being made, Ditto “would just smile and nod his head, like he was agreeing with what I was saying.”
At one point Ditto could be heard asking Deweese if McCall “slammed” Young back into his seat, to which she replied, “It wasn’t hard force, but it was just enough to sit him back down. No, it was not forceful.”
Deweese said she told the same story to FBI Agent Phillip Spainhour in November 2010 - “until Mr. Spainhour laid pictures before me from the dispatch area, and I knew I had to tell the truth.”
Those pictures, which Spainhour found by continuing to watch the dispatch-room video after McCall left the room, showed Deweese re-enacting the choking for another dispatcher. She denied defense attorney Erin Cassinelli’s contention that it looked like she was re-enacting McCall simply pushing Young down by the shoulders.
Earlier, Deweese acknowledged that in 2003, she resigned under pressure from her job at Overton Park Healthcare Center in Memphis, and later had her nursing license revoked by the state, for mishandling a dispute between a female patient and a male certified nursing assistant.
Deweese said she failed to send the nursing assistant home, gave the patient an injection to calm her without first consulting a doctor, and failed to chart her actions.
“I have paid for that dearly,” she said Monday, noting that she had been a licensed practical nurse for 20 years.
Arkansas, Pages 14 on 07/24/2012