People at the party then surrounded Gero and knocked him to the ground, the blog continues; “about 20 of the adults began kicking and punching the officer” while encouraging Goffigan to run. Gero managed to get hold of Goffigan’s shirt and “discharged his OC spray.” Still trying to escape, Goffigan threw a bag of marijuana to the ground. Additional officers then arrived, and Goffigan was arrested.
That was the BPD blog’s version, written by the department’s public-relations staff. But witnesses tell the Phoenix a vastly different tale, one in which there was no chase, no trespassing, and nobody punching or kicking an officer. Goffigan — a close family friend of Brown — was attending the party as an invited guest. In fact, Brown says she and Goffigan were playing musical chairs with some children at one end of the courtyard when Gero approached Goffigan and began hassling him. When Goffigan refused to be frisked — saying Gero had no cause — Gero let loose a blast of pepper spray, not only incapacitating Goffigan, but also injuring a number of children and adults. (The baby’s four-year-old brother, the birthday boy, demonstrated his sister’s reaction to the spray for this reporter.)
Unsurprisingly, the BPD public-relations writers left those injuries out of their blog account. What is surprising, however, is that the version they wrote for the blog differs significantly from the official police incident report — written by the only officer who was there, Gero — on which the blog was primarily based.
For starters, the blog entry appears to have added justifications for officer Gero’s demand to frisk Goffigan, which do not appear in his own report.
In Gero’s report, filed hours after the incident, he never says that Goffigan was trespassing, or even that he saw him near a NO TRESPASSING sign. The blog implies that the chase began in one location, and says that Goffigan ran away from the officer, eventually entering the courtyard. Gero’s report, however, makes clear that Goffigan was already in the courtyard and did not run to another location; Goffigan “quickly walk[ed] away from officer Gero, toward a party,” the report says. Unlike the blog version of events, Gero never suggests that he suspected Goffigan was carrying a weapon. These are not minor discrepancies; they are the difference between Goffigan refusing an unlawful or a lawful search.
The incident report also has Gero discharging his pepper spray before the crowd began beating him, while the blog turns it the other way around. The incident report says only that “several unidentified people” hit and kicked Gero; this became 20 adults in the blog version.
Asked about these discrepancies, BPD director of media relations Elaine Driscoll denies that the versions are different, beyond “semantics.” “I’m not going to get into a tit-for-tat debate,” she says.
And after initially saying the blog write-up was derived solely from the incident report, Driscoll later said that information from other officers was also used, although she did not elaborate. “We are confident that the chain of events happened as we described,” she says.
But Driscoll’s team omitted a large chunk of Gero’s story in its blog — a bizarre and highly implausible sequence of events that makes it difficult to give the officer much credence.
