Dallas officer accused of faking burglary story to hide his sex act in squad car | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Latest News
07:26 AM CST on Wednesday, December 16, 2009
A Dallas police officer is under criminal investigation after being accused of faking a burglary report to hide the fact that he was elsewhere, allegedly having sex with a woman in his patrol car, police said.
Officer Keith Ashley, who joined the department in 2001, has been placed on restricted duty. He declined to comment Tuesday.
"We do have it in public integrity," said Assistant Chief Ron Waldrop, who oversees the investigations bureau. He said he could not comment further because the investigation was under way.
Ashley came under scrutiny after a Nov. 24 incident in which teachers at the Lighthouse Christian Academy on West Illinois Avenue in west Oak Cliff reported that they had seen him engaged in sexual acts in the back of his squad car while it was parked in a school parking lot.
At the same time, he was supposed to be on a burglary call at an apartment complex on Preakness Lane. Ashley wrote in a report that he was flagged down by an apartment complex employee, who told him that a former employee was trying to break into an apartment.
Police investigators are looking into whether Ashley concocted the entire police report. He had worked off-duty security at the complex.
The woman whom Ashley reported as the apartment complex employee in the police report told WFAA-TV that she no longer worked at the complex and that she had spoken to an investigator.
Angela Russell, one of the teachers, told WFAA that she looked out the window of the school and saw a squad car with the back driver's side door open.
"I saw a leg hanging out of the door, and me and another teacher observed a police officer in the vehicle, and when we looked closer we realized they were engaging in improper conduct," she said.
She said the children saw what was going on, too. She approached the officer as the woman was leaving.
"I asked him, 'What's going on here? Do you know there are children in this building and this is a school and there are children here?' " she said. "Oh, and he gave us a story as to why it was going on, and then he left, and I immediately called and complained about it."
Ashley told commanders that the woman in the car with him was his wife and that they were having marital problems and he was consoling her.
Russell, who said she spoke with two police investigators last week, said she was infuriated and unsettled by the incident.
"Our children want to be police officers," she said. "We have a wall inside our school that if your father or mother or anybody in your family that's a police officer are put up on this wall, we say a prayer for you."
Ashley was previously in the news after he lost control of his squad car and struck a fence in May 2008. An iron rod from the fence broke the windshield and struck his chest.
