Frank started off the piece by discussing the public-transparency portals maintained by Reno Police and the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office.
“The county’s real-time flight-path dashboard is among the few in the nation with that much detail about drone operations available to the public, open-records advocates said,” Frank wrote. “The Reno Police Department also has a real-time online dashboard displaying statistics of its drone deployments and may soon add maps of flight paths like Washoe County’s portal. The more information that is available to the public, the more people will understand and trust the drone program, said Officer Hunter Mercurio, a Reno Police spokesman.”
So … what about Sparks?
“While Reno and Washoe County make their drone-flight information easily available to the public, Sparks requires the filing of formal open-records requests to access data about its DFR program, including its police drone policy document. Reno and Washoe County have their drone policies posted online,” Frank wrote.
While this lack of transparency by the city of Sparks is appalling, it’s far from the first time Sparks police have chosen secrecy over transparency. In fact, the Sparks Police Department has a disconcerting history when it comes to transparency and telling the truth.
More than a decade ago, the Sparks Police were embroiled in another truth-telling controversy. On Oct. 13, 2013, police responded to a report of a suicidal woman with a gun. As the RN&R reported on Feb. 27, 2014:
On the early afternoon of Sunday, Oct. 13, Monica Ritchey, 45, was depressed. Among other things, she was concerned about a police warrant and the possible loss of spending time with her grandchildren, according to police reports. Her daughter Brittnie Andrews said a lot of things weren’t going right for her and, “She was just done.” She was drinking alcohol and taking prescription medications, which had been prescribed for mental issues like depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Andrews speculates that the PTSD may have originated with the death of a daughter after surgery a few years ago, but she said there were other factors, like a divorce.
“She said, ’I don’t want to do this anymore, I just want to blow my head off,’” Andrews said. “This was ’normal’ when she was depressed. She’d call and say these things, and I knew she had guns at the house. … This time I felt like something was really wrong. So I called my sister [Darcie Latham].”
When the daughters entered the home on Woodhaven Lane in Sparks, things were already out of control.
“She was all the way across the room—and she said, ’Don’t come any closer. If you come any closer, I’m going to blow my head off.”
She fired a .22 caliber pistol into the floor just to show she was serious. The sisters went outside and called 911. By the time police had arrived, Ritchey had switched handguns to a .38.
After police arrived, it was a matter of minutes before Ritchey shot Latham in the hip, and officers returned fire, mortally wounding Ritchey. Latham survived. [Editor’s note: This story is developing, and Darcie Latham’s attorney, Richard A. Salvatore, alleges that police—not Ritchey—shot Latham.]
That editor’s note was prescient: It was later confirmed that police officer indeed shot Latham.
That truth was revealed, however, only after local media, the RN&R included, started asking a lot of questions.
This was the subject of the RN&R‘s editorial 12 years ago this week. The editorial in our Sept. 4, 2014, print edition (published online the day before) was headlined “Sparks PD should stop hiding from the truth.” It said, in part:
On Aug. 28 came the public admission that a member of the Sparks Police Department shot Darcie Latham. He shot her without knowing who he was aiming at or that the person he was shooting at was unarmed. It was a 50-50 chance, he was given bad intel, and we’re not second-guessing the decision, just pointing out the culpability on the part of local government when it comes to helping Latham reach a full recovery. While we acknowledge that it was a bad situation, and that the district attorney’s finding of justification is somewhat circuitous, our problem is the admission of deception from the Sparks Police.
“Initial reports indicated Darcie Latham was shot by her mother Monica Ritchey,” Sparks Police Chief Brian Allen said, as quoted by (the) Reno Gazette-Journal. “However, as preliminary interviews took place, it was learned by investigators that a Sparks Police Department officer shot Mrs. Latham in the upper leg region.”
Initial reports contained that information because the Sparks Police Department released documents stating that Monica Ritchey shot her daughter. They’ve been available online … since we ran the first installment of our Fatal Encounters series—a story about how government sets up roadblocks to prevent the public from knowing about deadly police violence.
When other media—namely Joe Hart at KRNV—followed up our report that Sparks Police were misleading the public, Sparks Police continued its evasions and omissions. What the hell is the problem with the truth over there, SPD? How does this reconcile with the sworn mission of police to uphold the law, including the laws regarding the public’s right to know? Six months knowing the truth was out there, but unwilling to reassure the public with transparency and honesty?
That was the whole point of one of Nevada’s foundational public records rulings, Donrey vs. Bradshaw, in which the Nevada Supreme Court found that officials should release information regarding ongoing investigations if the public had a heightened interest and should know the truth.
We’ll keep complaining, but it’s become apparent that Sparks Police Chief Brian Allen is making up the rules as he goes along, and transparency—with regard to a school shooting, or public records responses, or police shootings—is irrelevant to him. He severely undermined public confidence in his leadership and agency over the last six months with deception by omission.
Going back even earlier, one of the more significant stories I covered in the first portion of my career involved yet another mess by the Sparks Police. I wrote about the matter on Jan. 18, 2001, in the RN&R:
When Timothy Joe Mobly was captured in Mexico and returned to Washoe County earlier this month, it was joyous news. It meant a very bad person was behind bars, where he belongs. And it meant that everyone involved with an ugly case could finally move on.
Mobly had been on the run from the law since April 30, 1999. That was the day he was supposed to be sentenced for kidnapping and raping two women—ages 17 and 24 at the time of the attacks—who he met on the Internet in two separate incidents in late 1998.
I became very familiar with this case when I was the crime reporter with the Sparks Tribune. Shortly after the attack on the 17-year-old, I did a brief story based on a press release sent out by the Sparks Police Department. Like the SPD press release, my story did not even mention the fact Mobly and his partner in crime, Aaron Matthew Cross, had victimized a woman before the 17-year-old.
Shortly after that story ran, I received a phone call from a crying woman. Her name was Jennifer W., then a 24-year-old student at the University of Nevada, Reno. What she told me was hard to imagine—she said that she had reported her attack to the police more than a month before the attack of the 17-year-old. She claimed they didn’t believe her and even called her a liar.
“That 17-year-old girl never had to have this happen to her,” she told me.
Some quick phone calls confirmed the fact that Mobly and Cross had indeed been charged with attacking Jennifer W. But the Sparks police would not respond on the record to Jennifer W.’s allegations, as her case was still pending.
After some great consternation and debate, we decided at the Tribune to run the story. Jennifer W. was relieved that her side was finally being heard. Soon afterward, The Associated Press picked up the story, and the Reno Gazette-Journal followed. Within a couple of months, Jennifer W. had a lawyer and was on the Today show and Dateline: NBC, ripping the Sparks police for not believing her.
Cross and Mobly, seeing the evidence stacked against them, eventually agreed to a plea bargain, in which Cross admitted guilt to two counts of sexual assault against the 17-year-old, while Mobly admitted guilt to three total counts against the women. But when sentencing day came, Mobly, who was released on $20,000 bond, did not show up. Jennifer W. became hysterical and had to leave the courtroom several times before regaining her composure.
It was at the sentencing that the true ugliness of the crimes Mobly and Cross committed was revealed. Prosecutors said that in the case of the 17-year-old, she escaped from the men’s home while they were driving her car to the desert past Fernley.
When a victim’s car is dumped, that victim usually ends up dead.
Cross, who never made bail, got two life sentences in prison and won’t be eligible for parole for 20 years. Life in jail probably awaits Mobly, too. He will almost assuredly get three life sentences and won’t be eligible for parole for at least 30 years, not counting any extra punishment he receives for skipping bail.
Since the sentencing, and since the Sparks police settled a lawsuit filed by Jennifer W. for $24,999 last year, the fervor from this ugly case—so ugly that certain details of it have not yet been publicly told and may never be publicly told—was quieted, although it never went away. Jennifer W. moved on with her life the best she could, leaving Nevada—although she is reportedly helping out a writer with a book. The Sparks Police Department moved on and is trying to restore its reputation, which was, fairly or unfairly, badly damaged by the case. However, the fact that Mobly was on the loose hung over everyone’s heads.
But now that Mobly is behind bars, everyone can finally put the case behind them—the best that they can.
To reiterate a line from our Sept. 14, 2014, editorial: What the hell is the problem with the truth over there, SPD?
—Jimmy Boegle
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