Cop Sparks Huge Manhunt After Allegedly Shooting Up His Car, Calling in False Report
Police in Millis, Massachusetts, spent hours on Wednesday searching for a man who shot at a moving police cruiser, causing its driver to crash and the cruiser to catch fire. Today, the Millis Police Department said it believes that the officer who reported the shooting concocted an imaginary story about an attack after shooting at his own car.
“My cruiser’s been shot at. I’m at Forest Road. It’s going to be a dark maroon pickup,” the officer, who has not been named, radioed yesterday afternoon, WCVB reports. He stated that the pickup driver fired on him as their vehicles approached each other from opposite directions, and that he crashed while attempting to avoid the gunfire.
Schools in the area were closed today as a precaution, and local and state police sent SWAT teams and helicopters on a search for the alleged gunman, according to the Boston Globe. The officer who allegedly perpetrated the bizarre hoax works full-time as a dispatcher and part-time as an officer, and was hospitalized at Norwood Hospital and released Wednesday evening. Police said today that he will be fired from his job and may face criminal charges.
Millis Police Department spokesman William Dwyer said that the only ballistic evidence found at the scene of the shooting was “that belonging to the part-time officer,” and that investigators concluded he’d shot at his own cruiser after interviewing him and “as a result of all other evidence.”
“We have determined that the officer’s story was fabricated...specifically, that he fired shots into his own cruiser as part of a plan to concoct a story that he was fired upon. The evidence indicates that the shots were not fired by a suspect. And there was no gunman at large in or around the town,” Dwyer said.
The officer, 24, had been working for the department for about a year and a half, and would soon being training to become a full-time officer, the Globe reports.
