Andrews – The month of April started with a joke that ultimately became a part of one officer’s downfall.
Former Andrews police officer Coyle Olsen was terminated from the department last week following a pre-disciplinary conference with Town Administrator Sandy Dobson and town attorney Holly Christy. In a termination letter dated July 15, town officials cited five incidents of misconduct that resulted in the decision to dismiss Olsen from the agency.
The list includes Olsen’s actions from April 1, when he conducted a fake arrest as part of an April Fools’ Day joke. Olsen reportedly detained Jessica Raxter as a joke at the request of her husband, Jason Raxter, who is running for a seat on the Andrews Board of Aldermen.
“Lord help me. Im (sic) still trying to calm down after freaking losing it with tears in the back seat of a damn police car,” Jessica Raxter wrote in a Facebook post that has since been deleted. “I’m talking handcuffs, back seat of a cop car, and [Jason] and Cole (sic) were as straight faced as could be.”
It seems as if a prankster attitude existed throughout the Andrews Police Department, at least on some level. The entire force was suspended in mid-April after reportedly moving security cameras inside town hall, which doubles as the police station.
Some officers told members of the community they moved the cameras as a “joke.” The officers reportedly drew a smiley face on a sticky note before trying to attach it to one of the security cameras prior to moving them to face different locations.
However, that is only part of the story. The decision to manipulate security cameras in the police department followed an article in the Cherokee Scout, which reported that Olsen wrecked a patrol car on Main Street downtown.
Olsen was dispatched to investigate a reported overdose around 7:36 p.m. April 9, when his car jumped a curb at the United Community Bank. The Scout obtained data from his vehicle’s locator, which shows Olsen reached a speed of 64 mph 15 seconds prior to coming to a complete stop after the wreck.
However, the official collision report estimates that Olsen was traveling about half that speed. The N.C. Highway Patrol trooper who investigated the crash said he conducted “a cursory estimation” of Olsen’s speed based on “officers’ testimony and the physical evidence” at the scene.
The trooper told the Scout the vehicle locator’s data “probably describes exactly how fast” Olsen was going at the time of the accident. Olsen’s termination letter cites the excessive speed and his “lack of candor” about the speed as factors that contributed to his dismissal from the department.
On the day the initial article about the wreck became available online, Andrews police officers reportedly moved two security cameras in town hall because they felt they were being “spied upon” by dispatch personnel in the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, which fulfilled the Scout’s public records request. Officers also stopped using their vehicle locators.
Olsen’s termination letter cites his involvement in moving security cameras and the disconnecting of vehicle locators as factors that contributed to his dismissal from the department. The letter also cites Olsen’s “misconduct related to the handling of evidence” as a reason for termination.
One of the security cameras the officers moved covers a hallway containing evidence lockers and an entrance to one of the evidence rooms. The camera helps preserve the integrity of criminal cases, protect law enforcement personnel from false accusations of evidence tampering and protect the public from rogue police officers.
Olsen – plus officer Greg Shields, former officer Logan Howarth and former police chief Colin Gillespie – were suspended after Andrews officials determined they had moved the security cameras, which faced toward different locations for more than 24 hours before a town employee noticed.
Gillespie resigned last month. Meanwhile, officials decided not to renew Howarth’s employment contract, which ended June 30. That leaves Shields as the lone employee of the agency, not counting Dobson who also serves as administrative police chief.
The State Bureau of Investigation’s probe into the security camera incident remains ongoing.