The DeKalb County police officer accused of hitting and killing a man while rushing in his patrol car to a shooting earlier this month has been in trouble within the department before.
Jason A. Cooper was disciplined last year for sending an “inappropriate” Facebook message to the woman he had pulled over during a traffic stop, department records show. He also was disciplined early in his career with DeKalb police after he failed to correctly report an apparent kidnapping.
The records show Cooper to otherwise be a capable police officer.
Authorities now are trying to determine whether he was at fault for the death of Clinton Hightower. The man was hit and killed walking across Memorial Drive the night of May 14 as Cooper sped to the scene of a fatal shooting at the Starlight Six Drive-In on Moreland Avenue.
Cooper remains on paid administrative leave while the accident is investigated, DeKalb police spokeswoman Mekka Parish said.
A DeKalb police internal investigative report obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution under the Georgia Open Records Act showed that Cooper, in his fourth year with the department, was suspended for 10 hours for the Facebook incident.
According to the report, Cooper stopped the woman the morning of March 12, 2011 for failing to obey a stop sign. Later that day, the report said, Cooper told investigators he learned that he and the woman had mutual friends on Facebook, and he sent her a message.
“Ya sexy [butt] I shouldn’t have gave u that ticket,” the message read, according to the report and what the woman showed investigators when she reported Cooper five days later.
Police leaders placed Cooper on restricted duty and found him guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer on or off duty. It is unclear how the woman's traffic ticket was resolved.
Cooper could not be reached for comment, but in his statement for the investigation of the Facebook message, he admitted wrongdoing.
“This was poor judgment upon my part on sending a message to [the woman],” Cooper said.
He served his day-long, unpaid suspension in June.
The other disciplinary incident involving Cooper happened after he responded to an apparent kidnapping on Aug. 23, 2009.
The officer reported the incident to detectives assigned to the case as only an assault or battery, according to internal investigation files. A 12-year-old had been grabbed from in front of a church by a man in a pick-up truck and pulled by her hair into the truck before being kicked out a block away.
The internal investigation said Cooper completed his field report of the incident as a “simple battery” and failed to change the status of the case when corrected and instructed by his sergeant for several hours, keeping detectives “from promptly responding to the scene,” the internal report says.
Cooper was found guilty of neglect of duty and suspended for 10 hours. He had been on the streets for five months at the time of the investigation, and his precinct captain considered it a teaching moment in the memo recommending disciplinary action.
“Officer Cooper is still in the learning stages of law enforcement,” then-Tucker precinct Capt. S.R. Fore said in his recommendation. “This incident alone I believe will serve as an excellent training/learning experience.”
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