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Is Wooten a good trooper? 7/27/08
PALIN'S EX-BROTHER-IN-LAW: Union says yes, but investigation found serious concerns.
By LISA DEMER
ldemer@adn.com
07/27/08 00:02:08
He's the governor's ex-brother-in-law, and his job as an Alaska State Trooper is drawing scrutiny in a way rarely seen except in cases of killings by officers.
Legislators are seriously considering hiring an independent investigator to examine whether Gov. Sarah Palin, her aides or her husband pressured commanders to fire Trooper Mike Wooten, and whether she then fired the state's top cop when Wooten stayed on the job. Palin denies anything like that happened.
All that aside, what kind of trooper is Mike Wooten?
The picture painted by the Palins is pretty bad. The trooper brass isn't saying one way or another, citing personnel rules that protect his files. Union leaders defend him as a dedicated trooper who was already punished for his mistakes.
Efforts to speak with Wooten were unsuccessful. He did not return phone calls when the controversy first began two weeks ago. He now is out of the country on a long-planned vacation, said John Cyr, executive director of the Public Safety Employees Association, the union for troopers. They are not in touch. An e-mail to Wooten was answered with an out-of-the-office auto reply.
Wooten is 35, a state trooper since March 2001 and an Air Force veteran. He's a father of young children who has been married and divorced four times.
The accusations are detailed in two thick binders, the result of a nearly yearlong investigation by troopers. When the investigation appeared to stall, Palin -- more than a year before she was elected governor, and about two months before launching her campaign -- pushed trooper commanders to take action against Wooten. At one point, Palin and her husband, Todd, hired a private investigator.
Wooten recently gave his union permission to release the entire investigative file, all 482 pages and hours of recorded interviews.
"The record clearly indicates a serious and concentrated pattern of unacceptable and at times, illegal activity occurring over a lengthy period, which establishes a course of conduct totally at odds with the ethics of our profession," Col. Julia Grimes, then head of Alaska State Troopers, wrote in March 1, 2006, letter suspending Wooten for 10 days. After the union protested it, the suspension was reduced to five days.
She warned that if he messed up again, he'd be fired.
"This discipline is meant to be a last chance to take corrective action," Grimes wrote. "You are hereby given notice that any further occurrences of these types of behaviors or incidents will not be tolerated and will result in your termination."
It's nearly impossible to know whether other complaints have come in about Wooten in the last two years. His personnel file is confidential. But the fact he remains on the force is an indication that he hasn't had the sort of trouble that Grimes warned against.
Grimes declined to comment, as did various troopers involved in the investigation.
'... NOT WITHOUT A BLEMISH'
As the investigation got under way in 2005, Wooten was in the midst of a bitter divorce from Palin's sister, Molly McCann. The couple was fighting over custody of their two young children. Accusations flew from both sides.
Troopers eventually investigated 13 issues and found four in which Wooten violated policy or broke the law or both:
• Wooten used a Taser on his stepson.
• He illegally shot a moose.
• He drank beer in his patrol car on one occasion.
• He told others his father-in-law would "eat a f'ing lead bullet" if he helped his daughter get an attorney for the divorce.
Beyond the investigation sparked by the family, trooper commanders saw cause to discipline or give written instructions to correct Wooten seven times since he joined the force, according to Grimes' letter to Wooten.
Those incidents included: a reprimand in January 2004 for negligent damage to a state vehicle; a January 2005 instruction after being accused of speeding, unsafe lane changes, following too closely and not using turn signals in his state vehicle; a June 2005 instruction regarding personal cell phone calls; an October 2005 suspension from work after getting a speeding ticket; and a November 2005 memo "to clarify duty hours, tardiness and personal business during duty time."
"Mike is not without a blemish," the union's Cyr said. But some of the problems noted by Grimes were small matters, he said. Many troopers were told to reimburse the state for personal cell phone calls, he said. Wooten had to miss work for court during the divorce, he said.
The union president, Rob Cox, is a 17-year trooper veteran who worked alongside Wooten in the Valley. Cox said he never thought of him as a rogue cop.
It's significant that Wooten served for a while on the Special Emergency Reaction Team -- like a SWAT team, Cox said. Officers have to be especially cool-headed to perform in crisis situations, Cox said.
Wooten was the first backup officer to arrive at the scene of a standoff in 2006 at the Valley trailer home of Donald Voorhis.
TROOPER INVESTIGATION
Wooten's history spilled into public view after the July 11 firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan. The former commissioner has said he doesn't know why Palin wanted him out but wonders if Wooten's situation was part of it. He has said that members of Palin's administration, and the governor's husband, talked with him about the accusations against Wooten, which he considered improper.
"Never put pressure on Walt Monegan to fire -- hire or fire -- anybody," Palin responded.
The troopers' investigation into Wooten began after Chuck Heath -- Wooten's father-in-law and Palin and McCann's dad -- alerted troopers about a domestic violence protective order McCann had obtained against Wooten on April 11, 2005. McCann filed for divorce the same day, according to the court docket.
The trooper had not physically assaulted his wife but intimidated her and threatened to shoot him, Heath told troopers, according to a memo about the complaint.
The same day, a concerned neighbor of the couple called troopers with more accusations, including alcohol abuse, based on what Heath and McCann had relayed to him. Wooten seemed "disconnected" lately, the neighbor said. He told troopers that Heath and McCann were afraid to call troopers themselves.
"Extreme verbal abuse & violent threats & physical intimidation," McCann wrote in her April 11, 2005, petition to the court. He had driven drunk multiple times, threatened her father, told her to "put a leash on your sister and family or I'm going to bring them down," her petition says. A judge issued a 20-day protective order to keep Wooten away.
In written orders to Wooten sent the next day, trooper Capt. Matt Leveque echoed the court's directive. Leveque, now a major, also told Wooten to give up his department-issued guns, badge, credentials and vehicle during his off-duty time, while the order was in effect.
On April 27, 2005, trooper Sgt. Ron Wall began the internal investigation, interviewing and re-interviewing more than 15 people over a period of months. Witnesses included Palin, her husband, Todd, two of their children, Heath, McCann, her son, Wooten, friends, neighbors, a bartender, and other troopers.
Here's what the troopers found out:
ILLEGAL MOOSE HUNT
In September 2003, Wooten, McCann and a friend who was a Wasilla police officer, Chris Watchus, hunted moose from a boat in the Jim Creek area.
McCann had drawn a permit for a cow moose but had never done that kind of hunting before, she told troopers in the investigation. They brought Wooten's rifle, a .300-caliber Winchester Magnum. Chuck Heath had been riding her to make sure the permit was used, Wooten told Wall. It was the last day for the hunt, McCann said. The Mat-Su lottery tags are highly coveted.
Minutes into the trip, they spotted a cow. "Do you want to shoot the moose?" Wooten says he asked his wife. As he recounted it, she told him that she didn't.
McCann said that Wooten took out the gun and shot the moose.
"I guess I assumingly thought that he would help me sight it in and whatever you do you know to tell me, show me how to do it. Unless he planned all along of just shooting it," McCann told Wall, according to the transcript.
The first shot didn't bring it down, so Wooten fired a second time. During the personnel investigation, Wooten initially insisted there was nothing wrong with killing a moose under his wife's permit. At the time of the interview, he was a wildlife investigator for troopers. He was assigned that job in October 2004, about a year after killing the moose. Before joining the force, he was a wildlife conservation agent on Elmendorf Air Force Base but wasn't responsible for enforcing rules on moose hunts, he said.
The killing of the moose without a permit was a criminal misdemeanor, Grimes wrote in the March 2006 letter to Wooten. He was removed from wildlife investigations.
Wooten was never charged criminally. Troopers say the moose shooting wasn't investigated as a crime.
"Once a complaint is received on a trooper, more often than not it goes into what we call an administrative inquiry, and that's how the discipline is handled," said Col. Gary Folger, now director of the state Division of Alaska Wildlife Troopers, which was formed after Palin took office in 2007. At least that's true for wildlife offenses, he said.
Col. Audie Holloway, director of Alaska State Troopers, said he couldn't speak about wildlife cases in the separate division but said generally, "a trooper has to answer for his crime." He said he couldn't talk specifically about Wooten's situation.
The statute of limitations for shooting a moose without a permit is five years.
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