Not yet. But the look on his face made it clear he intended to find out and that whoever it was wouldn't get away with it quietly. The suspension lasted 4 days before Garvey found a way to fight back. He couldn't do it with a badge anymore. Not with his authority frozen and the internal review crawling forward without him.
But he still had a phone and he still had friends who owed him favors. On Monday morning, one of those favors paid off in the form of a phone call to a reporter at a smaller, more sympathetic outlet, one that had run friendly pieces on the police union before and wasn't shy about it. The story ran that afternoon under a headline built to spread. Is the district attorney using his office for personal revenge? It didn't deny the raid happened.
It didn't deny the wrong address. Instead, it planted a different question in the reader's mind. Was it really fair for Francis Waldridge, the victim of the raid, to also be the man deciding whether the officers involved faced charges? Wasn't that exactly the kind of conflict of interest the justice system was supposed to prevent? The article quoted an anonymous law enforcement source, Garvey, though his name never appeared, describing Francis as a man who'd turned a paperwork mixup into a personal crusade and was using his office to settle a private score.
By Tuesday morning, the story had legs. Local talk radio picked it up. A city council member sympathetic to the police union repeated the phrase personal crusade in a public statement and it stuck the way ugly phrases always seem to stick better than true ones. Mayor Peggy Howard watched it all unfold with quiet satisfaction from behind her desk at city hall. She hadn't started the story, but she didn't need to slow it down either.
A fractured public split on whether to trust the district attorney or the police department was exactly the kind of mess that let her stay above the fray. Sympathetic to everyone committed to no one protecting the endorsement she needed for November. Let it breathe, she told her chief of staff when he asked if she wanted to issue a statement defending Francis. The DA can defend himself. That's not our job right now.
It wasn't subtle and it wasn't meant to be. Francis felt the shift almost immediately. Calls that used to come easily from other city officials started going to voicemail. A columnist who usually supported his office ran a piece questioning whether he should recuse himself from any case touching his own household. Strangers online and a few people he actually knew began repeating the same line back to him in different words.
Isn't this a little convenient? Your house gets hit and suddenly you're going after the whole department. He sat in his office that evening watching a local news segment with the sound low, the anchor's voice calm and measured as she laid out both sides of a story that only had one side that mattered. A family's home destroyed and a department that had buried three complaints just like it before this one. The segment ended with a Chiron that made his stomach turn.
DA's office faces. Conflict of interest questions. His chief of staff, Roxanne, stood in the doorway watching it with him. They're better at this than we gave them credit for. She said quietly.
They've had practice. Francis said, "This is exactly what they did to Brooks. To the other two families. Make it about them instead of what actually happened. He clicked the television off and sat in the sudden quiet, jaw tight.
It worked before because nobody with a platform was standing behind those families. It's not going to work this time. Roxanne crossed her arms. So, what do we do? Francis was already reaching for his phone, already thinking about the engineer's report sitting in a folder on his desk.
The demolition invoices, the photographs Stella had taken of the wreckage before any repairs began. He thought about his wife, still displaced from her own home, still flinching at loud noises since that morning. They want to talk about conflict of interest, Francis said. Fine, let's give them something harder to argue with than an opinion piece. He looked up at Roxanne, something hard and certain settling into his expression.
Set up a press conference in front of the house. I want the cameras standing exactly where those officers were standing when they tore it apart. When? As soon as we can get it together, Francis said they gave us a story built on doubt. It's time we gave them the receipts.
2 Days later, cameras lined the sidewalk outside 44 Somerset Court. Francis stood on his own front lawn, the same patch of grass where Stella had knelt, with her wrists zip tied behind her, and looked out at a crowd of reporters that had grown far larger than his office anticipated. Terresa Anderson stood near the front, notebook ready, having covered enough of this story already to know it wasn't finished. Behind Francis, the house still wore its wounds openly. The plywood covering the broken windows hadn't been removed.
The hole in the hallway wall was visible through the open front door. He'd insisted on it staying exactly as it was for this. Let people see it. Let them stop imagining and start looking. 3 Days ago, Francis began, voice steady, carrying clean across the yard.
A story ran, suggesting I opened an investigation into this department out of personal revenge, that I'm using my office to settle a score. He paused, letting that sit in the air a moment. I want to show you exactly what score we're talking about. He held up a folder, then handed pages to Roxanne, who passed copies down the row of reporters. This is an independent structural engineers report commissioned by my office and reviewed by two separate contractors.