Compare and contrast with this incident in
Aurora, Colorado:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1429725/posts
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Off-duty cop pulls gun in road rage incident
9News.com ^ | June 24, 2005 | Chip Youst
Posted on 06/24/2005 7:14:36 AM PDT by Millee
An Aurora Police officer is facing disciplinary action after an incident in which he pulled his gun on another motorist during an off-duty altercation on the highway.
It started with a lane change on I-225.
That's the part everyone agrees on. What everybody doesn't agree on is whether or not
the officer - who was off-duty, out of uniform and driving his personal car - should have pulled his gun on the other driver.
"I put my signal on and started to merge lanes when my fiancee tells me that there's car over there," said Parker Bell.
(Bell is the other motorist, not the police officer)
Bell admits he cut off the other driver. However, Bell says the other driver still had time to slow down - but wouldn't.
"The person driving this pickup then takes the shoulder - speeds past me - (and) they're just waving their hands and yelling inside their vehicle," Bell said.
Then, Bell says he got mad, too.
"I was upset and I was angry and I flicked the person in the blue pickup off," Bell said.
Bell's fiancée, Ashley Meadows, says she tried to calm Bell down.
"They were both kind of antagonizing each other - the guy would pull on the side of him and say something, or look at him or something - and then Parker would get mad and he would say something back," Meadows said.
The blue pickup exited at Alameda. Parker Bell - who says he was taking his pregnant fiancee to a doctor's appointment around the corner - got off at the same exit - pulling up behind the other driver.
Bell says he saw the man staring at him again in his rear view mirror - and that Bell again made more hand gestures.
That's when
the other driver (Officer Mark Asmussen) got out of his car - gun drawn - and approached Parker Bell - who was still sitting in the driver's seat. His fiancée says she immediately reached over, rolled up Parker's window and locked the doors.
"When I saw the gun, I was like: 'Oh my God - he's going to shoot him,'" Meadows said.
Turns out
the other driver was an off-duty Aurora cop - but Bell and his fiancée say they didn't know that because he wasn't displaying a badge.
Ashley called 911.
Bell and Meadows say that the officer pulled on the door and told Parker to open it and show him his driver's license.
Only after trying unsuccessfully to open Bell's car door does Bell say that the officer showed his badge.
Ashley's 911 call appears to back up that account.
But Aurora
Police Chief Terry Jones says the officer, Mark Asmussen, has a different story.
"The officer indicates that as soon as he got out of his truck he held his badge out and approached the car with the badge in front of his body," Jones says.
And,
Jones says if the officer felt threatened - as Jones says he apparently did - then he was within policy to have his gun drawn.
Bell and Meadows see no reason why the officer should have felt threatened. They say Bell was still in his car with his seat belt on, with his fiancée and his two year old son. They say at no time did Bell give any indication he was going to get out of the car.
Jones says the officer apparently didn't feel the same way. Even so, Chief Jones says Officer Asmussen could have handled things differently. He could have called in an on-duty officer to handle the situation.
"Get assistance from a marked car that's on duty and then you avoid all these circumstances," Jones said.
Asmussen is now facing discipline in the form of a write up in his file - but the discipline is not for pulling his gun.
The discipline is for the traffic ticket he wrote Parker Bell after the incident. Since Asmussen was off duty, Chief Jones says writing Bell the ticket went against department policy.
Nevertheless, the chief doesn't plan to drop the ticket against Parker Bell. He says the evidence suggests the ticket - which was for an illegal lane change - was warranted.
Bell plans on fighting the ticket in court.
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