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Report: Deputy treated officer fairly during stop

The officer was stopped on DUI suspicions.

By JONATHAN ABEL
Published March 14, 2007

BROOKSVILLE - As the inquiry into the Brooksville Police Department stretches into its fifth week, the Hernando Sheriff's Office has concluded its own internal affairs investigation involving a Brooksville police dispatcher who was stopped by a deputy in Spring Hill.

Just before midnight on Aug. 21, Brooksville dispatcher Patrick Hramika was pulled over on U.S. 19 for suspicion of driving under the influence.

The deputy who stopped him, John McMurdo, performed field sobriety tests with Hramika, but he was not comfortable that he had enough evidence of impairment to make a DUI arrest.

In those situations, McMurdo said, he typically tries to get the driver off the road without letting him get behind the wheel. And that's what he did in this case.

Hramika, however, said he didn't have any family members who could pick him up. It came up that Hramika worked for the Brooksville Police Department, so McMurdo called the department and left his cell phone number for someone to call him.

Brooksville Police Chief Ed Tincher called McMurdo to ask about the situation. Tincher told the deputy not to do anything special for Hramika, according to the internal affairs report.

If Hramika was DUI, he should go to jail, Tincher said. But if Hramika just needed a ride home, that could be arranged.

When McMurdo said there wasn't enough to make an arrest, Tincher arranged to send a patrol car to pick him up.

Reached at home on Tuesday, Tincher, who is on administrative leave, said he would do the same thing if it happened again and that the deputy had done nothing wrong.

He said there were four officers on duty that night and one of them, Krystal Nix, was an officer in the field training program.

He sent Nix in her patrol car to pick up Hramika in Spring Hill because she "was not [patrolling] a zone by herself so she was pretty much expendable" and because, by sending an officer to pick up Hramika, it would give the Police Department a chance to evaluate his condition.

Information about the incident was forwarded to Karen Phillips, who was acting city manager at the time. Tincher said some type of "corrective action" was taken but it fell short of discipline.

Sgt. Kathleen Reid, the Internal Affairs investigator at the Sheriff's Office, spoke with Hramika only briefly during her inquiry.

"Mr. Hramika acknowledged that he had been drinking and that the deputy may have 'cut me some slack,' " Reid wrote, "but stated he was not belligerent with the deputy and did everything he was instructed to do."

The Sheriff's Office investigation concluded that McMurdo did not give Hramika any special treatment and that the deputy did nothing wrong.

But Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Donna Black said the county would have done things differently.

"The Sheriff would not authorize sending a department unit to retrieve a Sheriff's Office employee in the type of situation as detailed in the [internal affairs report]," she wrote in an e-mail to the St. Petersburg Times. "Especially out of our jurisdiction."

Jonathan Abel can be reached at 352 754-6114 or jabel@sptimes.com.

[Last modified March 13, 2007, 23:14:39]