May 31--The Broad Run attorney representing the Culpeper Police officer and Iraqi War veteran charged with murder in the Feb. 9 shooting death of Patricia Ann Cook said Wednesday that his client was merely defending himself, and that what happened to him that fatal day "placed him in greater fear for his life" than anything that ever occurred on the battlefield.
U.S. Marine Daniel Harmon-Wright, 32, of Gainesville was arrested Tuesday following a four-count indictment handed down by a special grand jury accusing him of feloniously killing Cook, 54, of Culpeper following an altercation that initiated in a parochial school parking lot on North East Street.
Harmon-Wright, hired by the Culpeper PD August 30, 2006, also faces charges of malicious shooting into an occupied vehicle, malicious shooting into an occupied vehicle resulting in a death and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.
A Virginia State Police release put out the day after the incident said the officer's arm was trapped in the driver's side window of Cook's Jeep Wrangler when she started pulling away dragging the officer alongside. But at a news conference Tuesday at VSP headquarters in Culpeper, special prosecutor Jim Fisher, Fauquier County Commonwealth's Attorney, said he would not have used the terms dragged and trapped to describe what happened to Harmon-Wright. Fisher acknowledged there was a brief struggle at the driver's side window causing minor injuries to the officer.
The special prosecutor did not elaborate further.
But Harmon-Wright's defense attorney Daniel L. Hawes, a pro-gun advocate whose Fauquier County firm is called Virginia Defense League, said Wednesday that while his client might have initially used those phrases to describe what happened to him, it is not how he would have worded it exactly.
"But never did he say, 'It didn't happen,' only that the characterization was not one he'd have chosen. I'd have said, 'My hand was pinned,' and 'I was being carried along by the suspect's vehicle," Hawes said in an email to the Star-Exponent.
"(Harmon-Wright) was caught, however, and (Cook) was engaged in an alternating brake and accelerate cycle designed to cause him harm," the officer's defense lawyer said in Wednesday's email. "Similarly, during his 50-yard ride on the Jeep's running board, the guy did yell and scream at her to stop, and he did put his hand on the door handle in order to open the door (which the suspect had locked). At some point, he did remove his hand from the door handle, pull out his gun and shoot the glass. But it wasn't until all else failed that he extricated himself by stopping the threat with finality."
Pick up Thursday's Star-Exponent and stay with starexponent.com for more on this developing story.
Copyright 2012 - Culpeper Star-Exponent, Va.
