Not fast, faster. Captain Niles Granger was placed on administrative leave 11 days after the council session. The notice cited pending command review related to complaint handling procedures and records compliance. It did not cite the word discrimination.
It did not cite the word coverup. It cited procedures and compliance because institutions discipline their own in the language of process, not morality. And because the difference between you failed to follow protocol and you enabled racial profiling is the difference between a suspension and a lawsuit. Sergeant Barrett Tull was suspended without pay.
The suspension notice, which was not made public, but was obtained through a federal subpoena, cited failure to establish articulable, reasonable suspicion prior to investigative stops in four of the seven encounters with Micah. It also cited unauthorized physical contact with a minor during a non-custodial encounter. The suspension was indefinite, pending the outcome of an internal affairs investigation that had been opened 3 days after the council session by an Internal Affairs lieutenant who had been transferred in from a different county specifically because no one at the Collier Ridge precinct could be trusted to investigate itself. Deputy Ross Embry was referred to the U.S. Attorney's Office for potential prosecution under the federal statute prohibiting the alteration or falsification of records in connection with a federal matter.
The referral was based on the supplemental narratives Embry had added to three incident reports, narratives whose language contradicted the body camera footage frame by frame. Embry's attorney issued a statement saying his client acted within established departmental practices and did not knowingly alter any document in connection with a federal investigation. The statement did not explain how Embry's supplemental narratives described furtive movements that were not visible on any frame of any video from any camera present at any of the stops. Officer Colton Briggs received a written reprimand.
The reprimand cited his decision to stop Micah's voice recorder in his statement that the boy did not need to be recording police officers, which contradicted Georgia's one-party consent law. Briggs did not contest the reprimand. He also did not return to the Collier Ridge precinct. He requested and received a transfer to a precinct in South Fulton County where the demographics were different and the cameras were fewer and the questions were not yet being asked.
Naen Ashford's repeated reports were referred to the Fulton County District Attorney's Office for review under Georgia law governing knowingly false reports of a crime. The DA's office accepted the referral and assigned it to an assistant district attorney. As of the date of this account, no charges have been filed. The assistant DA told a reporter from the Atlanta Journal Constitution that the office was evaluating the totality of the circumstances and that the threshold for criminal prosecution of false reporting requires demonstration of knowing falsity, which is a higher bar than many people realize.
Ashford resigned her council seat. She cited personal reasons. She did not cite the federal investigation, the referral, or the 11 911 calls. She continued to live at 14 Windham Lane.
She continued to drive the white Lexus with the community first bumper sticker. She did not speak publicly about any of it. And then there were the things that were not resolved. The body camera footage from Tull's patrol assignments on January 14th and January 22nd, covering two stops of black pedestrians in the Collier Ridge area that were part of the broader pattern file remained listed as corrupted, unrecoverable in the precinct's digital evidence log.