Trooper in Evans case drawing new scrutiny

When University of Georgia athletic director Damon Evans was pulled over for suspected drunken driving last month, he encountered an officer praised by colleagues for his thoroughness but also criticized by higher-ups as sometimes being overzealous.

State Trooper Mark Cabe spent a good part of July in the spotlight as the officer whose detailed, salacious report cost Georgia’s top athletic official his job.

According to Cabe’s personnel file, the eight-year veteran and member of the Georgia State Patrol’s “Night Hawks” DUI Task Force is highly trained and has been described by his commander as a “very hard worker and an aggressive trooper.”

But supervisors have noted disturbing conduct in several traffic stops.

“I have heard talk that he is over-aggressive and does not like to be challenged. He seems to be quick to take an offensive stance as opposed to attempting to defuse a situation,” Capt. W.H. Ashburn, his commander, wrote in a 2008 response to a complaint against Cabe.

Last year, a female college student was strip-searched on the side of the road after Cabe suspected that she or the driver of a car she was in had marijuana. None was found. Cabe was suspended for three days, then left the Milledgeville post to work out of Atlanta, though he still lives in Sandersville, Ga.

Cabe referred all questions to his superiors. Ashburn, in an interview Friday, said the trooper “makes good stops.”

“By the nature of working the hours he prefers to work, he gets more people drinking. That generates more cases and more complaints,” said Ashburn.

But people from Damon Evans’ DUI attorney, Steve Weiner, to Washington County Sheriff Thomas Smith say they get numerous calls complaining about Cabe.

“His problem is he gives people a lecture; he’s judge and jury on the road,” said the sheriff, whose jurisdiction includes Cabe’s home. “His job is not to downgrade people.”

Smith forwarded the complaint about the strip-search to state authorities.

On June 19, 2009, Cabe pulled over a car for weaving. A 21-year-old man was driving and the passenger was his girlfriend, a college honors student. When Cabe walked up to the car, which had pulled into the woman’s driveway, he thought he caught a whiff of marijuana, he told investigators looking into the complaint.

Cabe sent a text message to a local officer to see if the man was a known drug user and said he was told he was. He shined a light into the driver’s eyes, checked his pulse and performed other tests before determining he was not impaired. Still, the trooper called for a drug dog, searched the car and the driver, then called for a female officer from a nearby town to search the woman.

When the officer arrived, Cabe offered her rubber gloves and told her to take the woman to an area near some bushes and search her, according to the 300-page investigative report of the incident.

“She made me drop my pants and told me to drop my panties and made me squat and cough,” the woman told investigators.

The woman said Cabe told her he had heard she’d been arrested for drug possession before. Police found no such arrest record.

Cabe later said he did not want the woman strip-searched, but investigators later determined it was reasonable for the female officer to assume that’s what the trooper wanted.

A sergeant who was investigating the complaint told Cabe later, “I have three daughters. I have a problem with it based on circumstances,” according to a transcript of the interview.

Despite finding nothing, Cabe told investigators that he still thinks the couple had pot.

A year earlier, in February 2009, Ron Bray, a teacher from Wrightsville, was driving to a restaurant with his 7-month-old daughter and 11-year-old son. Cabe pulled behind him and followed for three to four miles, Bray recalled, before stopping him for allegedly crossing the center line.

Initially, there was a discrepancy with the vehicle’s registration. Cabe put Bray in the back of his patrol car. The teacher told investigators there were several times when his infant could be heard crying in the truck. But, an investigator wrote. “TFC Cabe would not let him check on his son.”

Cabe wrote Bray a ticket for having tinted windows. The ticket was dismissed, and Cabe was issued a “letter of concern” by superiors.