A Rutland City police officer has been suspended for “dereliction of duty” for her role in a bungled investigation of an off-duty Vermont State Police trooper. The drunken driving charge against him had to be dropped.
Officer Misty Klementowski started the seven-day suspension without pay on Wednesday, according to Rutland City Police Chief Brian Kilcullen.
“Discipline was imposed in this case for policy violations, including abuse of discretion and conduct unbecoming an officer,” Kilcullen stated in an email Wednesday. “Generally speaking, we characterized the officer’s actions as a dereliction of duty.”
Kilcullen said he determined the discipline in consultation with the city’s human resources department and city attorney.
Klementowski could not immediately be reached Wednesday for comment.
Craig Roland, a trooper assigned to the Rutland barracks, was arrested in January on a drunken driving charge. However, that charge was thrown out by a prosecutor who cited the apparent “deferential” treatment the trooper received from the officers involved, including Klementowski.
Klementowski was working as a training officer for a new recruit from the department, Avery Schneider. They were on patrol, enforcing the winter parking ban on city streets, early on the morning of Jan. 6 when they came upon a vehicle owned by Roland, Schneider’s boyfriend.
Schneider, who was a “probationary officer” at the time, no longer works for the city police department, Kilcullen said, though Schneider’s departure from the department was not related to the incident.
Case records show that, at one point, the officers told Roland he could perform his own preliminary breath test. A later roadside test revealed that the off-duty trooper had a blood-alcohol content more than twice the 0.08 legal limit for driving.
As the officers investigated, they let him back up his pickup truck from the road into a driveway. As he did so, according to records, he either hit a tree or brushed up against shrubs; the officers’ accounts differed.
VTDigger reported about the case last month, based on documents obtained in a public records request. At the time, Kilcullen said his department was still considering what discipline would be imposed in the case.
Since the incident involved a law enforcement officer in the county, Rutland County State’s Attorney Rose Kennedy said she referred Roland’s drunken driving case to a prosecutor in a different jurisdiction.
Stacy Graczyk, a state traffic safety resource prosecutor based in Addison County, took up the case. In a letter to Kilcullen earlier this year, Graczyk revealed several reasons the case against Roland couldn’t go forward, including contradictions in the Rutland officers’ statements and their deferential treatment toward the off-duty trooper.
“The fact that Roland was treated so differently than what would be expected in this situation would be damaging for the officers’ credibility in front of a jury,” the prosecutor wrote.
Further, “the contradiction between the two officers’ accounts, possible omission of key facts by Officer Klementowski, and the deferential treatment Roland received present hurdles the state would be unlikely to overcome.”
