"Ibragim Todashev shooter had stormy record as officer; Boston agent who killed Tsarnaev friend was target of brutality suits with Oakland police" by Maria Sacchetti | Globe Staff May 14, 2014
The Boston FBI agent who fatally shot a Chechen friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in Florida last year had a brief and troubled past at the Oakland Police Department in California. In four years, Officer #8313 took the Fifth at a police corruption trial and was the subject of two police brutality lawsuits and four internal affairs investigations. He retired from the department in 2004 at age 31.
These are the thugs the FBI is hiring now? Big-city rejects?
I sure as hell hope he is not pulling down a pension.
Over the past year, FBI and Massachusetts officials have refused to identify the two state troopers and the agent involved in the May 22, 2013, shooting of Ibragim Todashev, 27, in his Orlando apartment, where he agreed to be interviewed. During the session, Todashev, a mixed martial arts fighter with a criminal record, turned violent, flinging a tabletop at the FBI agent and brandishing a metal pole at the trooper, they said. He was stopped by seven bullets from the FBI agent’s gun.
Took that many for a guy who had limited mobility because of knee surgery?
Even Florida, which often identifies such officers, declined to do so in this case, citing concerns for the investigators’ safety.
The Globe obtained their names by removing improperly created redactions from an electronic copy of Florida prosecutor Jeffrey L. Ashton’s report — which in March found the shooting of Todashev justified — and then verifying their identities through interviews and multiple government records. Those records include voting, birth, and pension documents.
That research identifies the FBI agent as Aaron McFarlane, 41.
Now he can be charged, right?
McFarlane’s full name and birth date on records in Massachusetts and New Hampshire match that of the Oakland police officer who was involved in several controversies during his four years with that police force. He retired with a pension of more than $52,000 annually for the rest of his life.
As California looks to tax you for taking a sip of water. No wonder that state is broke all the time.
In California, lawyers who had sued McFarlane in Oakland were stunned that the FBI later hired him.
I'm not; life is not a TV show or movie with clean-cut FBI agents following the law.
“I would be shocked to learn that the Aaron McFarlane we sued a decade ago could have gone on to have a career with the FBI,” said Ian Kelley, a San Francisco lawyer who sued McFarlane on behalf of a man, Michael Cole, who accused McFarlane and another officer of beating him.
The events described in that lawsuit, he said, “should have thrown up a red flag.”
It kind of did, if you get my meaning. In other words, we gotta get that guy!
Ben Rosenfeld, a civil rights lawyer in San Francisco who represented a plaintiff in a similar case against McFarlane, said the FBI should have been concerned about the allegations against McFarlane.
“There are enough qualified applicants out there and the FBI’s supposed to be the cream of the crop,” he said. “I don’t think they need to reach that low into the barrel.”
Well, that illusory image was shattered years ago. Remember 1993 when they told the Egyptian informer to give the terrorists real explosives so they could blow up the WTC garage? An omen of worse things to come.
But others said McFarlane was a fine officer in a struggling police department in one of the nation’s most dangerous cities. Oakland has one of the highest crime rates in the nation, with more than double the homicides and robberies as Boston, but with fewer than half the police officers, just 650 for the city of 400,000.
Governor Jerry Brown was mayor there once.
“He’s a very good police officer. People understand the environment in Oakland is particularly toxic and very tough,” said Barry Donelan, president of the Oakland Police Officers’ Association. “A lot of the officers are going elsewhere because the experience they gain here is unmatched.”
Howard Jordan, a former Oakland police chief who said he helped train the young McFarlane, said it was well known in Oakland that McFarlane had gone to the FBI. He described McFarlane as a “solid officer,” smart, quiet, and confident, with many friends in the department.
I stand corrected. Great guy.
Todashev’s family and civil liberties groups say the official investigations into the shooting failed to examine the troopers and FBI agent, and their decisions leading up to the shooting. Even if Todashev had attacked, they said, the authorities on the scene could have prevented the death of Todashev, a key figure in the bombings investigation, a witness considered so crucial that the FBI had him under surveillance by land and air.
What do you mean "even if,"and how many re$ources were used keeping this guy under aerial(?) surveillance?
Ashton, the prosecutor who investigated the shooting, said through a spokesman in March that he declined to interview McFarlane directly because the FBI would not let him record the interview. Instead, the FBI provided Ashton with the agent’s statements.
That, in turn, has fueled critics’ view that the prosecutor’s report is flawed. “A report that doesn’t include that kind of history is not a complete report,” said Hassan Shibly, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Florida, which is conducting its own investigation of the shooting.
Ashton’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The Department of Justice also cleared McFarlane in the shooting in a separate report.
Until now, little has been known about the investigators in the room with Todashev.
The FBI has refused to say whether McFarlane was involved in any past shootings, though the Oakland police said he had not been involved in any shootings there. The Massachusetts State Police said neither trooper had ever been involved in a shooting.
The FBI had found Todashev quickly after the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon bombings and initially he cooperated, answering questions about accused bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whom he knew during their days together in the Boston area.
Todashev provided fingerprints and a DNA sample, according to FBI records in the Florida prosecutor’s report released in March, and met with investigators three times at law enforcement offices.
Then the FBI heard Todashev had booked a flight to his native Russia. On the night of May 21, 2013, McFarlane and the two state troopers, all law enforcement officials now in their 40s, were rushing to Todashev’s apartment in Orlando, working one of the biggest cases of their lives.
A year later, it is unclear why the FBI sent McFarlane, an agent with about five years on the job. He was with the two state troopers assigned to the case, Curtis Cinelli and Joel Gagne, and a Florida task force officer, who remained outside. Their names were also confirmed by the Globe by unredacting the prosecutor’s report — a process made relatively simple because the blackout technique used to cover the names was faulty and could easily be removed by using common software.
This is the same government supposedly protecting all our private information that the NSA has been collecting?
Really fills you with confidence, 'eh?
Cinelli is a veteran trooper with several commendations who specializes in hunting fugitives. Gagne is the lead investigator in the 2011 killing of three young men in Waltham, a crime in which Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a suspect.
What did they need him for? Todashev had been cooperating and showing up at FBI offices before they rushed over there that night and grilled him for hours over signing a statement saying he had complicity in a murder he had nothing to do with. When the authority got tired of his refusal, they killed him.
The troopers declined to comment through the State Police union’s lawyer, Richard J. Rafferty Jr. McFarlane, the son of a former police officer, became an FBI special agent in Boston in November 2008, according to a federal court affidavit.
Unions suck ass.
McFarlane had worked at the troubled Oakland department from 2000 to 2004, during the biggest police corruption scandal in the city’s history.
Not because of him. He was a good officer, he really was!
Oakland fired four police officers who called themselves the “Riders” after prosecutors filed criminal charges against them in 2000 on accusations of beating and kidnapping people, making false arrests, planting evidence, and falsifying police reports.
That never happens in AmeriKan police departments!
(Actually, it is more standard operating procedure than not now)
No one was ever convicted, but the city settled a federal lawsuit for $10.9 million and the department remains under court oversight today.
So who is ultimately paying the price for all this? Taxpayers.
McFarlane testified for the defense in the first Riders criminal trial. In his cross-examination, prosecutor David Hollister suggested that McFarlane had falsified a police report to drum up a reason to arrest a man. According to a court transcript requested by the Globe, Hollister said the report, which was investigated by Oakland’s internal affairs unit, “at first flush certainly appears to be criminal.”
Hey, the feds do it all the time.
“I think on its face, Officer McFarlane should probably have some concerns about whether or not he violated Section 118.1 of the Penal Code in filing a false police report,” Hollister said.
No.
McFarlane reluctantly pleaded the Fifth to avoid incriminating himself and later testified under immunity, but he told Hollister that he did nothing wrong.
“I write the truth in my reports,” McFarlane said, according to the transcript.
Not only is he scum, he is lying scum. Just what the FBI looks for!
Hollister also questioned McFarlane about another arrest that night: a man who suffered a head injury. A police report said McFarlane had transported him to jail, according to the transcript. McFarlane said he did not know how the man was injured.
Shortly after McFarlane’s testimony, two men filed lawsuits against McFarlane and another officer accusing them of beating them the year before. Michael Cole, a convicted drug dealer, said McFarlane held him down as another officer, Steven Nowak, allegedly stomped on his head, injuring his eye and breaking his nose, allegedly because Cole’s uncle had filed a complaint against Nowak.
Oh, you can't believe him!
McFarlane and Nowak denied the assertions in court records. McFarlane said Cole kicked and hit him during a search of a notorious drug corner and injured himself when he fled in handcuffs and fell.
Yep.
The city settled the suit for $22,500. The city also settled a related lawsuit for $10,000 filed by Cole’s friend Robert Girard, who said McFarlane and Nowak beat him after he photographed Cole’s injuries at the hospital. McFarlane said Girard had barged into an off-limits area and hit McFarlane in the chest.
In the settlements, McFarlane and Nowak did not acknowledge any wrongdoing and Nowak remains in the department. Oakland police would not divulge the outcome of the internal affairs investigations, saying it was confidential.
Yeah, the only ones without privacy protection in AmeriKa are innocent citizens.
Donelan, the union president, said Oakland police are often targeted by frivolous lawsuits that are settled to avoid the expense of a full-blown trial. “This is litigation central,” he said. “It’s not about the officers. It’s about the environment they’re operating in.”
But if the police are innocent.... ????
According to court records, McFarlane had repeatedly injured his leg and broken an ankle while on the force, and retired on medical disability. Amy Morgan, spokeswoman for the state-run retirement system in Sacramento, said only that he is collecting a pension of more than $52,000 a year for life.
Plus disability settlement or payments?
It is unclear what McFarlane did next, but federal records show he joined the Boston FBI in 2008 after passing a rigorous background check and graduating from the bureau’s academy at Quantico, Va.
Couldn't have been that rigorous a check.
At the time of the Marathon bombings, he was investigating bank robberies, working with Boston and other police agencies, and sometimes appearing as a guest speaker at industry conferences.
Oh, $tink.
In Boston, the FBI refused to discuss McFarlane’s work history, saying it could threaten his safety.
Oh, threaten his safety!
“Publishing the alleged name of the Agent involved in this shooting incident serves no public interest or service, except to foster continued media scrutiny,” the Boston FBI said in a statement. “The personal safety of the Agent continues to be of concern to the Boston Division, and publishing the Agent’s name potentially places the Agent and his family at risk for reprisal.”
Don't worry; it will all go away real soon.
McFarlane has previously been publicly identified in a blog about the Boston Marathon case.
Hmmmm!
Although the State Police declined to comment on the troopers’ identities, and expressed concern about naming them, Geoffrey P. Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina, said that some states and police departments routinely publish the names of officers involved in shootings so that the public is aware of the facts.
As if government cared about our awareness of the facts!
“The public has the right to know if an officer shoots his weapon. They work for us,” said Alpert, who has testified in police-involved shootings in Texas and other states. “Usually when an officer fires his weapon, that’s a pretty serious event and it should be public. . . . The more they try to hide it, the more you wonder why.”
I don't wonder why, and they have seemed to forgotten that they work for us.
It remains unclear why the agent and troopers did not wait to persuade Todashev to come to a secure office or find a way to detain him the night he was shot.
Upset that the FBI had reported his girlfriend to immigration, Todashev refused to meet the investigators at a secure government office, where he had gone for past interviews.
As they let kids spill over the border!
With 30 minutes’ notice, the investigators rushed to Todashev’s dimly lighted apartment, with an AK-47 sticker on the door and a samurai sword on the wall.
Which law enforcement slapped the sticker on the door?
Authorities also have not said why the investigators, after more than four hours of questioning, thought it was safe to break their own rules by leaving only two men alone in the room with Todashev.
C'mon! It's because we are going to kill this guy and we don't want to see it and be witnesses!!!
Just two weeks earlier, Todashev had singlehandedly fought two men in a parking lot as the FBI watched.
So the lyin' FBI says!
In his statement, McFarlane said he felt Todashev was an 8 on scale of 1 to 10 for his propensity for violence.
As the clock neared midnight, it appeared the investigators’ work had paid off.
Todashev had confessed to helping Tsarnaev kill the three men in Waltham. The bodies of Brendan Mess, who was Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s friend, Raphael Teken, and Erik Weissman were found in Waltham in September 2011, their throats slit and their bodies sprinkled with marijuana.
Related:
"Weissman, 31, a local entrepreneur.... ??
In January 2011, eight months before the triple homicide, Boston
police searched a Roslindale apartment where Weissman was living and
seized more than $21,000 in cash, along with a drug ledger, a currency
counter, digital scales, and a wide assortment of drugs, including marijuana, hashish, cocaine, and Oxycontin. Weissman also was a partner in a small business called Hitman Glass, which manufactured and sold glass bongs used to smoke marijuana, according to a Facebook remembrance page, interviews, and public records. Several friends of the victims noted that each of them had been selling drugs for years.... Weissman, may have resorted to selling guns because he had forfeited cash and a stash of drugs when his apartment in Roslindale was raided... The Globe was unable to obtain [his] death certificate."
I think we just found the entrepreneuring killer, and why weren't these guys in jail?
"Boston police searched Weissman’s Roslindale apartment and seized more than $21,000 in cash, along with drug paraphernalia and a wide assortment of drugs, including marijuana, hashish, cocaine, and Oxycontin.... Teken attended Brookline High School and Brandeis University and his father, Avi Teken, is the spiritual leader of a Jewish congregation in Newton."
Now what would radical Islamist jihadists be doing with a bunch of drug-dealing, gun-running Jews, and why did the Mossad just pop into my mind?
Todashev, according to the Florida report, had told investigators that he believed that he and Tsarnaev were going to the Waltham house to steal $40,000, not to kill the men.
The troopers had captured the confession on video and audio, according to the report, and Todashev then sat down to put it in writing. The troopers sent the news to officials in Massachusetts.
???????
“Who’s your daddy?” Cinelli said in one text, according to Ashton’s report.
Oh, they were all arrogant and had attitude, 'eh?
Though the troopers felt they had probable cause to arrest Todashev, the district attorney’s office told them to wait for a warrant. Around midnight, Gagne stepped outside to call the Middlesex district attorney’s office.
An instant later, the room filled with a loud roar. According to the only witnesses, McFarlane and Cinelli, Todashev flung a table at McFarlane’s head, opening a gash that required nine staples to close. Then, instead of fleeing out the door, Todashev allegedly grabbed a metal broomstick and aimed it at Cinelli.
McFarlane said he staggered to his feet, bleeding, and shouted at Todashev to stop. When Todashev lunged at Cinelli, McFarlane said, he shot him several times. McFarlane said Todashev fell and then got up, prompting McFarlane to shoot him again. Cinelli told officials that he “absolutely” would have done the same thing.
Amazing how for the FBI not talking about it we know so much through the mouthpiece media me$$anger here!
After the shooting, McFarlane told the FBI he did not know that the State Police troopers had been taping Todashev’s confession. He said he often had his back to the troopers as they questioned Todashev.
But once he learned about the recordings, McFarlane suggested to a supervisor that they release the confession to the media. In a statement supplied to the Florida prosecutor, McFarlane said he told a supervisor “it would be nice if we released the video because it would refute many of the press’ allegations.”
The FBI and the State Police did not release the videos.
Need I type a word?
In March, 10 months after the shooting, the Florida prosecutor and the Department of Justice released hundreds of pages of documents on the shooting at once — and then largely declined to comment.
It's called a DOC DUMP!
--more--"
"City of Oakland to look into FBI agent’s pension" by Maria Sacchetti | Globe Staff May 22, 2014
The city of Oakland, Calif., is investigating the $52,000-a-year pension of a retired police officer who later joined the FBI and who fatally shot a friend of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in May 2013.
Too late. Ironclad contract.
Aaron McFarlane, identified last week as the agent who shot Ibragim Todashev during an interrogation in Orlando, has collected the pension since he retired from the Oakland Police Department in 2004 at age 31, say California officials. He apparently received the pension for medical reasons, court records say, though he passed the FBI’s stringent physical requirements when he joined the bureau four years later.
I'm $eeing $ome fraud here!
McFarlane stands to receive the money, with cost-of-living increases, for the rest of his life, say officials of California’s pension system for public employees. Court records say McFarlane retired after suffering leg injuries on the job. Officials said disability pensions for on-the-job injuries are tax free.
“We’re investigating it,” Karen Boyd, communications director for Oakland’s interim City Administrator Fred Blackwell, said of McFarlane’s pension. She declined to elaborate, citing confidentiality rules, but said the city could refer the matter to the district attorney or take other action.
The investigation follows a Globe report last week detailing McFarlane’s troubled history with the Oakland Police Department. During his four-year tenure, he exercised his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in a police corruption trial after a prosecutor suggested he falsified a police report and then testified under immunity. He also was the subject of two police brutality lawsuits and four internal affairs investigations, records show.
In court records, McFarlane denied the brutality accusations and falsifying the police report.
Disclosure of McFarlane’s pension has struck a nerve in Oakland, a Northern California city of 400,000 beset by high crime and a tight budget. Over the last decade, Oakland has slashed 720 city jobs, including dozens of police officers; closed firehouses for days at a time; and limited basic services such as code enforcement and fixing streets, city records show. The city’s unfunded pension liability is nearly $1.5 billion.
This week, the president of the Oakland City Council, Patricia Kernighan, expressed “real frustration that Oakland is still paying a disability pension to somebody that is still working in law enforcement.”
She said she also asked her staff to look into McFarlane’s pension. “We want to make sure that people who are truly disabled on the job get fair compensation,” Kernighan said. “But we certainly don’t want to be paying able-bodied people for a disability that they don’t have with public funds.”
The FBI declined to answer questions about McFarlane’s pension. Bureau officials say McFarlane is a hero whose quick thinking, despite a head injury, may have saved the life of a Massachusetts state trooper during their encounter with Todashev a year ago Thursday.
Or cost one.
McFarlane and two state troopers were interrogating Todashev in his Orlando apartment last May when Todashev allegedly confessed to helping Tsarnaev kill three men in Waltham in 2011.
After one of the troopers left the room, Todashev allegedly attacked the agent and the remaining trooper, wielding a metal pole, said the Florida prosecutor who investigated the shooting. The FBI agent then shot Todashev seven times. Todashev was a 27-year-old mixed martial arts fighter with a criminal record, including an arrest that month stemming from a fight over a parking space in Orlando.
Honestly, that many times shows a person out of control, not a trained FBI agent.
In March, Florida prosecutor Jeffrey L. Ashton and the Justice Department ruled in separate reports that the use of deadly force against Todashev was justified, saying the agent acted in self-defense.
That is the great thing about AmeriKa: authority will always be absolved of murder, from the very, very top on down.
“None of your reporting to date has anything to do with what happened in that room,” Kieran L. Ramsey, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI in Boston, said in a brief statement to the Globe, which identified the agent last week over the bureau’s objections. “Law enforcement officers were violently attacked and responded with justifiable deadly force.”
The master scolding the mouthpiece.
Ramsey refused to answer questions about why the bureau hired McFarlane despite his troubled record in Oakland and his past injuries. According to the bureau’s website, aspiring FBI agents must pass a fitness test and be in “excellent” condition, “with no disabilities which would interfere in firearm use, raids, or defensive tactics.”
Agents often face physically demanding conditions, the website said. “In these instances, physical fitness is often the factor that spells the difference between success and failure, even life and death,” the FBI says on its website.
After McFarlane retired from the Oakland police force in spring 2004, he became a licensed real estate appraiser, according to records at the California Bureau of Real Estate Appraisers. His license expired in September 2008, and he did not renew it. According to court filings, he became a Boston FBI agent in November 2008.
Todashev’s family and supporters have disputed the government’s account of the shooting. They say the FBI’s failure to disclose McFarlane’s past troubles, including questions about his credibility, raise doubts about official reports by the Florida prosecutor and the Justice Department that ruled the shooting justified. McFarlane and Trooper Curtis Cinelli of the Massachusetts State Police are the only witnesses to the shooting.
“He did not attack anyone,” Todashev’s mother-in-law, Elena Teyer of Georgia, a retired US Army pharmacy specialist, said in a telephone interview. “He was not suicidal. He was not an idiot. He was intelligent. He was trained from a little child how to calm himself down and control his emotions. He was a professional fighter.”
But 8 out of 10 on the possibly violent meter.
Teyer, the mother of Todashev’s estranged wife, was in the Army from 2007 until March and has won numerous medals, including for the Global War on Terrorism, according to an Army spokesman. Teyer planned a memorial vigil for Todashev this week in Orlando.
That's why the kid split from the family. He's was radicalizing himself.
A spokesman for Ashton said this week that the FBI did not tell Ashton or his investigator about McFarlane’s past in Oakland.
“Mr. Ashton did not know any of the background of the officers,” spokesman Richard I. Wallsh said. “What we presented in our report was a full and exhaustive discussion of the information that we had in our possession.”
Barry Cohen, a Florida based lawyer working with Todashev’s family, said that McFarlane’s background should have been disclosed in the official reports clearing him in the Todashev shooting.
“The omission of this material from the report is so deceitful,” said Cohen. “Don't you think his family and the public has the right to know, if they’re relying on the testimony of a man like this FBI agent, to know who he is?”
He is so right!
The shooting reports from Florida and the Justice Department did not name the FBI agent or the Massachusetts troopers interrogating Todashev that night. The Globe obtained their names in March by removing improperly created redactions from an electronic copy of Ashton’s report and then verifying their identities through interviews and multiple government records, including voting, birth, and pension documents.
Wallsh said Florida typically discloses the names of officers involved in shootings, but withheld them in this case at the request of the FBI, which would cooperate with the investigation only under that condition. The FBI did not want the names released, citing concerns for their safety.
Cohen said federal prosecutors also should have disclosed McFarlane’s background in other criminal cases, because his credibility has been questioned in the past.
Shortly before the Marathon bombings last year, McFarlane signed an affidavit filed in US District Court in Boston in a bank robbery case he helped investigate.
Oscar Cruz, the federal public defender in that case, said he did not know of McFarlane’s history in Oakland. Cruz said he was not immediately sure it was relevant to his client, who pleaded guilty. But, Cruz said, “I think I’d like to know.”
A spokeswoman for US Attorney Carmen Ortiz said requirements that the government disclose information about an investigator to the defense depends on a variety of factors, including “whether the case goes to trial or results in a guilty plea.”
“Had the agent been called to testify in this case, the government would have produced all required information,” said Ortiz’s spokeswoman, Christina DiIorio-Sterling.
I didn't know DAs did double talk.
--more--"
And as suspected, despite the calls four redress, this whole incident has once again rabbited down the ma$$ media memory hole. Government knows it can wait you out.
"Group demands answers in Ibragim Todashev’s death" by Maria Sacchetti | Globe Staff May 15, 2014
A civil liberties group demanded answers from federal and state investigators who cleared a Boston FBI agent in the shooting last year of a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, following a Globe report Wednesday on the agent’s troubled record as a police officer in California.
Hassan Shibly, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Florida, said the Justice Department and a Florida prosecutor should have disclosed that agent Aaron McFarlane was the subject of police brutality lawsuits and internal affairs investigations and that he pleaded the Fifth Amendment during a police corruption trial in their March reports exonerating McFarlane in the shooting.
On May 22, 2013, the FBI agent shot and killed Ibragim Todashev after he allegedly confessed to helping Tsarnaev kill three men in Waltham in 2011. Todashev, a 27-year-old mixed martial arts fighter, allegedly attacked the agent and a Massachusetts State Police trooper after he sat down to write his confession, prompting the agent to shoot him.
“Did your office know about the allegations of abuse, corruption, and falsifying evidence against the FBI agent who shot Mr. Todashev?” Shibly said in a letter to the Florida prosecutor, Jeffrey L. Ashton, citing the Globe and his own investigation of the shooting. “If your office did not know about the agent’s history, how can the public trust the thoroughness and reliability of the investigation?”
Shibly sent similar letters to the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, which also cleared McFarlane in March, and the FBI, asking the bureau if it had investigated McFarlane’s background at the Oakland Police Department in California before they hired him in 2008.
Justice Department spokeswoman Dena Iverson confirmed that the department received the council’s letter and is reviewing it. Ashton did not respond to requests for comment. The FBI declined to comment on the letter.
The FBI has refused to address McFarlane’s record, but in California court records, McFarlane denied any wrongdoing. He said he pleaded the Fifth during a police corruption trial in 2003, after a prosecutor suggested he had illegally falsified a police report, only to avoid being unfairly swept into the controversy.
McFarlane also denied beating anyone, as two lawsuits claimed, and said the plaintiffs were the aggressors. Former colleagues described McFarlane as a fine officer in one of the most crime-ridden cities in the United States.
Oakland police declined to reveal the outcome of its internal affairs investigations, saying the information is confidential.
McFarlane joined the Oakland police in 2000 and retired four years later at age 31, apparently for medical reasons, according to court records. He is collecting a pension of more than $52,000 a year, according to the state-run pension system.
McFarlane’s path from the troubled Oakland Police Department, which is under federal court oversight, to the FBI raised a number of questions Wednesday.
Daniel Pellissier, president of California Pension Reform, a Sacramento-based nonprofit advocating for California to better control pension costs, said McFarlane’s pension seemed high for such a short time on the force.
“I think that almost everyone would agree that a $52,000 pension for four years of work without some additional factor is ludicrous,” he said in a recent interview.
James J. Wedick, a former FBI agent who ran the public corruption squad in Sacramento, said it is risky to hire agents whose credibility has been questioned because doing so could weaken future cases.
I take the same risk purcha$ing a paper.
“In a New York minute, his credibility is flushed down the toilet,” he said. “There should be a voice in the room that says, ‘We are creating a problem here that we may not be able to overcome later on.’ ”
Or the al qaeda, so to speak.
Until the reports clearing the agent were released in March, the investigation had been shrouded in secrecy, generating criticism of the FBI.
Doesn't help with the credibility, especially when they are sitting on video of it all.
Much was known about Todashev’s violent criminal record, including an arrest the month he was killed for allegedly beating two men in a Florida parking lot. He was a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, now dead, who with his younger brother Dzhokhar is suspected of carrying out last year’s Boston Marathon bombings.
Not according to his mother-in-law.
But little was known about the only witnesses to his shooting, the agent and a Massachusetts state trooper, Curtis Cinelli. Another trooper, Joel Gagne, had also witnessed his alleged confession — the troopers said they recorded it — but had stepped outside to make a phone call shortly before the shooting.
And there is where everything false apart. If it were a confession this would not have happened and it would be released to validate the killer cop.
What is likely on the video is a denial of all involvement, followed by exasperation by the agents. Then a couple of guys say they are going to make phone calls to report the bad news, and wink, wink, nudge, nudge, he had a gun, knife, pole, stick.
The FBI and Ashton had refused to identify the agent and the troopers, citing concerns for their safety.
The Globe obtained the agent and the troopers’ names by removing improperly created redactions from an electronic copy of the Florida prosecutor’s report.
Todashev’s family and friends said the official investigations of the shooting failed to scrutinize the actions of the troopers before the shooting. Even if Todashev had attacked, they said, the agent and troopers could have tried to interrogate him at a secure location, possibly preventing the death of a key figure in the investigation into Tsarnaev.
Yeah, why didn't they?
--more--"
"Group calls for review of Todashev shooting" by Maria Sacchetti | Globe staff May 23, 2014
A Muslim civil liberties organization is urging a Florida prosecutor to reexamine the FBI’s fatal shooting last year of a friend of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, saying the prosecutor failed to scrutinize records of the officers at the scene.
“We are extremely disappointed that your office failed to investigate the background of the FBI agent and the other officers involved,” Hassan Shibly, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Florida, wrote to prosecutor Jeffrey Ashton in a letter on May 22, the anniversary of the death of Ibragim Todashev.
“The fact that you failed to do so makes it absolutely clear your report is neither complete nor reliable,” the letter said.
Ashton and the US Department of Justice ruled in March that the agent shot Todashev in self-defense after the 27-year-old mixed-martial arts fighter allegedly attacked him and Massachusetts State Trooper Curtis Cinelli. But Ashton admitted through a spokesman this week that he did not examine the agent’s record during his time on the Oakland police force from 2000 to 2004.
According to court and police records, the agent, Aaron McFarlane, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in a police corruption trial and was the subject of two police brutality lawsuits and four internal affairs investigations until he retired at age 31, apparently for medical reasons. Court records show McFarlane denied any wrongdoing. He receives a pension exceeding $52,000 a year, which the city of Oakland is investigating.
The FBI issued a statement Friday saying the agent’s use of deadly force was clearly justified.
“As the extensive documentation in two independent reports clearly indicate, each of the witnesses’ accounts from the agencies involved in the matter were the same,” said Kieran Ramsey, assistant special agent in charge in Boston. “There is absolutely no dispute that law enforcement officers were violently attacked by Mr. Todashev and subsequently responded with justifiable force.”
Case closed.
McFarlane, Cinelli, and Trooper Joel Gagne were in Todashev’s Orlando apartment that night in May 2013 to question him about a 2011 triple homicide in Waltham and his connection to Tsarnaev, who died last year after a confrontation with police. The agent and troopers said Todashev had confessed on tape to helping Tsarnaev kill the three men in Waltham, when he attacked the agent and trooper.
Todashev also had a criminal record, including an arrest earlier that month for badly beating a man in a fight about a parking space.
MacFarlane (sic) did the world a favor, huh?
Ashton’s report, initially hailed as the only independent review of the shooting, relied on forensic evidence and the accounts of the only witnesses, McFarlane and Cinelli, among other records.
Hailed by who? Ma$$ media mouthpieces?
--more--"
Also see: Ibragim Todashev shooting: Release State Police tapes
Want to bet they will have been "accidentally" lost or destroyed a few years hence?
Oddly, Ibragim Todashev became something he never wanted to be: a martyr and monument to murderous AmeriKan tyranny. May Allah rest his soul.
