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By Gina Barton of the Journal Sentinel
The four Milwaukee police officers suspended for failure to fully investigate the hit-and-run crash that killed Navy veteran Nicholas Rozanski last fall are Daniel Boeck, Eric Fjeld, Sean McCord and Troy Stofflet, according to internal affairs records.
Britney M. Wilkinson, 24, of Milwaukee, the driver of the car that collided with Rozanski’s moped, was allowed to plead no contest to two misdemeanors because Assistant District Attorney Mark Williams feared the substandard police work would make it difficult to prove a felony at trial. She was sentenced last month to a year in jail, with work and school release privileges, followed by up to two years of probation.
Wilkinson originally was charged with hit-and-run involving death and faced a maximum possible prison term of 25 years.
One officer was suspended for three days, another officer was suspended for two days, and two more officers were suspended for one day each, according to an earlier statement by Anne E. Schwartz, Milwaukee police spokeswoman. Schwartz did not immediately return messages Friday. A summary of the internal affairs investigation does not indicate the lengths of the suspensions received by each officer.
The crash occurred around 3 a.m. Sept. 11 near the intersection of S. 1st and W. Florida streets. After Rozanski, 35, was knocked from his moped, Wilkinson left the scene for between 20 and 45 minutes, according to a criminal complaint.
Wilkinson drove nearly four miles to a gas station, where she called her boyfriend. He picked her up and drove her back to the crash site. She told police she did not hit the moped, but rather hit two curbs as she swerved to avoid it and could not stop because she had two flat tires and her brakes were not working.
Fjeld and McCord let Wilkinson go home even though they did not believe her story, the summary says. They also did not conduct field sobriety tests, a breath test or a blood-alcohol test on Wilkinson even though she told them she’d had a couple of drinks.
The other two officers, Boeck and Stofflet, were the first to respond to the accident scene. Stofflet “did not activate the squad’s lights and siren and could not articulate why it took them 15 minutes to arrive,” the summary says. Boeck told Fjeld and McCord that Rozanski was in stable condition, although the firefighters and paramedics on the scene denied telling the police that, the summary says.
None of the officers was aware that Wilkinson was related to a Milwaukee police officer, the report says.
Detective Edwin Johnson, who interviewed Wilkinson at the jail, testified in November that he didn’t immediately inform her of her right to remain silent and her right to an attorney because he was conducting a “24-hour background investigation,” not a criminal interrogation. He was not disciplined.
