by Discount Fish
We’re all aware that men, women and children die of accidental gunshot wounds with distressing regularity. Lives are destroyed, families are ruined and we hope the offending guns are disposed of or locked up for safe-keeping. For my part, if one of those near and dear to me was killed by accidental gunfire, I would never want to go near another gun. And if I ever was to shoot someone, I would hope to be my own victim.
In what may have been an accident, JoAnna Miller, the 34 year old pregnant wife of a Montgomery County police officer, was shot in the head by her husband at their home in East Norriton Township near Philadelphia on Friday. The incident occurred just before 3 pm. The police as of yet have offered few details beyond the following:
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Ms. Miller’s husband is Joseph Miller, a seven-year veteran state trooper. Their two children were home during the incident but were not harmed. Miller told investigators that he was cleaning his personal .45 caliber pistol and did not realize it was loaded. The investigation, which is continuing, is a joint effort of the county police and the District Attorney’s office. A D.A. spokesman said, “There is some indication at this point that it was an accidental discharge of the gun.”
Three days later, apparently nothing more has been reported. Thus, there’s very little to infer from. A veteran police officer was cleaning his gun, said he didn’t realize it was loaded, apparently aimed it at his pregnant wife (one might suspect playfully, according to his story) and fired. The initial indication from investigators suggests that they are backing up his story.
Thus, it is useless to speculate further on the incident at this time. It does, however, remind us of a similar shooting:
In November of last year, the New York Times did an investigation into a shooting in St. Augustine, Florida, in 2010, by a police officer who may have shot and killed his girlfriend and gotten away with it. The story was titled: “Two Gunshots on a Summer Night: A Deputy’s Pistol, A Dead Girlfriend, A Flawed Inquiry.” PBS’s Frontline worked with the Times and aired a documentary two days later.
It took three years for the details of the story to be revealed. The girlfriend, Michelle O’Connell, 24, had been shot in the mouth and was dying when police arrived. She was the mother of a 4-year-old girl. A second bullet was in the carpet, next to her right arm. Also on the carpet was a semiautomatic pistol belonging to her boyfriend, Jeremy Banks, a deputy sheriff for St. Johns County. It was his service firearm.
One of the first deputies who arrived on the scene, also from St. Johns County, realized Banks had been drinking. Within a short time, many other deputies who knew Banks arrived at the residence, offering him their moral support.
Banks himself had called in the shooting to 911, stating it was accidental. He reported that he had not been in the room when Michelle had shot herself. Curiously, she had broken up with the officer and, according to Banks, was packing her things to leave when she shot herself.
According to the Times, however, Michelle’s family thought differently. She had texted her sister, who was babysitting her daughter, two hours earlier stating, “I’ll be there soon.” Another sister told police investigators that in the months prior to the fatal shooting, Banks had domestically abused Michelle.
The Times wrote: “Before the sun rose the next morning over this place that calls itself ‘the nation’s oldest city,’ the sheriff’s investigation was all but over.
“Ms. O’Connell, the sheriff’s office concluded, took her own life. Detectives were so certain in their judgment that they never tested the forensic evidence collected after the shooting. Nor did they interview her family and friends, who would have told them that she was ecstatic over a new full-time job with benefits, including health insurance for her daughter.
“And through it all, the O’Connell family continued to believe that the sheriff’s office, investigating one of its own, had blinded itself to the possibility that the shooting was a fatal case of domestic violence.”
The Times reporter, Walt Bogdanich, as part of the Frontline workup, interviewed the medical examiner and asked: Could the victim have removed the pistol from its elaborate holster? From a similar holster holding the same model gun, the medical examiner himself struggled and couldn’t do it. Could she have shot herself at the angle in which the bullet entered her mouth? It would take a left-handed shot to have achieved this; Michelle was right-handed.
The St. Augustine story, as the Times reported it, was about how the police investigate one of their own. They seem to have decided on a narrative quickly, before even beginning a real investigation. Then they stuck to it regardless of what they found or didn’t wish to find.
Sometimes police investigations tend to be quick and careless. But that wasn’t the case here. This case was about the blue wall. Naturally, the public would not be pleased if they became aware that the county sheriff’s department had hired a deputy capable of a domestic homicide. What the public should be even more upset about are the revelations that the appropriate interviews and canvassings never took place; the case was stone-walled and Banks, the boyfriend, was never charged in the shooting.
One hopes that in the case of JoAnna Miller, three years from now, another investigative reporter does not need to revisit her death in Pennsylvania for the same reasons the St. Augustine shooting ended up a documentary on Frontline.