Sal Culosi, December 17, 1968 – January 24, 2006

As we take in the gun-to-a-snowball-fight travesty, a reminder that D.C.s MPD isn't the only place around here to employ folks who shouldn't have guns: Saturday's Washington Post had a story from Tom Jackman that tried to keep some attention on last month's killing of David Masters by a Fairfax County police officer.

Masters was shot from behind as he sat in his car after being pulled over. He didn't have a weapon. Not even a snowball.

The police and other law officials in Fairfax County refuse to release any information about Masters killing.

From Jackman's piece:

[Masters] drove 50 miles from his $3,600 trailer in Fredericksburg, stopped outside a landscaping business in Fairfax County and pulled a bunch of tall flowers out of a planter. A few minutes later, the police spotted him and signaled to him to pull over. At Route 1 and Fort Hunt Road, he stopped, and the officers got out of their car. And then, perhaps, Masters did something. The Fairfax police won't say what. A furtive gesture? A yell? And a Fairfax officer shot through Masters's rear passenger window and killed the unarmed man as he sat in his Chevrolet Blazer.

One month after the former Green Beret and disabled carpenter was slain, Fairfax police have not publicly said why Masters, 52, was shot in the middle of a busy intersection on the gray afternoon of Friday the 13th in November. They won't say who fired the shots, what Masters did to provoke the shooting, how many shots were fired or what the many witnesses at the intersection told them they saw.

The killing of Masters is only the latest case of a police officer shooting unarmed folks in Fairfax County. And the silent routine is the M.O. the county always uses  in these situations.

Two of the higher profile wholly unjustifiable killings by Fairfax County:

Sal Culosi, an optometrist with no police record, was shot by Deval Bullock, a Fairfax County SWAT team member, while standing not fully dressed outside his home in January 2006, as he talked to an undercover cop. Police said Culosi was about to be arrested for running a booking operation, though at the time of his murder the operation's only betting client was apparently the undercover cop. Robert Horan, Fairfax County's top prosecutor at the time, declined to press charges against Bullock for killing Culosi, who would have turned 41 last week. The killing was an accident, the county said. Bullock, a D.C. native, didn't even get tossed off the force or have the .45 he killed Culosi with taken away. "I'm afraid of my government, all because of what I've seen here," a friend of Culosi's told me last year.

And, in 2000, Prince Jones, an unarmed Howard University student, was shot at least eight times in the back in a Falls Church driveway by Cpl. Carlton Jones (no relation), a P.G. County undercover cop who'd been following him for hours. Carlton Jones later said he had the wrong man. Horan declined to prosecute in that case, also. A civil court jury awarded Prince Jones' survivors more than $3 million in a wrongful death suit.

Anybody objective source who looked into the evidence of the killings of Culosi or Prince Jones would be appalled. But there was no video, unlike in the snowball fight. And if there's no video, the police get to write the story. So, not coincidentally, the public outcry for any action after both murders was almost non-existent.

Horan's longtime assistant, Raymond Morrogh, is now commonwealth's attorney for Fairfax County. Morrogh will decide whether to take action in Masters killing. So we'll learned if he'll continue his old boss's pattern of allowing police officers to shoot unarmed men in Fairfax County.

But Morrogh has set a different sort of law-and-order tone for his jurisdiction. The same day Jackman's story about Masters appeared, the Post also had an article about Erick Williamson, a man Morrogh prosecuted for walking around his Fairfax home while "intentionally nude."

Good morning, City Desk readers. It's Libertarian Friday, are you ready to rage against the system? Great! Here's some news:

• Culture11, the conservative/libertarian Web magazine started by Conor Friedersdorf, Peter Suderman, Joe Carter, David Kuo, and James Poulos and based in Arlington, laid off its entire staff on Wednesday. According to Kuo: "We raised a certain amount of money last year predicated on the assumption we would raise more money...Then the fall’s fall occurred and we stretched money as long and far as we could without incurring any debts. With no new money in the door the board decided the most prudent thing to do was suspend business operations." Andrew Sullivan's eulogy for the magazine is especially touching.

• Pete Eyre, founder of the anti-statist social networking site Bureaucrash, has been trying to schedule a meeting with someone from the Arlington Police Department after he was intimidated by an Arlington police officer. (Background: Eyre called the APD after he found an officer had parked his cruiser in a no-parking zone while he went to the gym. The officer who responded to Eyre's call politely refused to write a ticket and left the scene. The officer who had been working out, however, decided to exercise his authority by following Eyre around the neighborhood in his gym clothes, sometimes right up close, sometimes from a distance. Eyre walked nearly a mile away from his home and found the officer was still following him. Always ready to fight the system, Eyre recorded the incident on video.)
• But a little hassle is nothing compared to death by police shooting, the subject of Dave McKenna's Cheap Seats story "Death by Wager." McKenna's lead says it all: "Sal Culosi was shot and killed by a Fairfax County cop three years ago last Saturday. He was about to be arrested for taking football bets, the quarry of a dubious sting operation that seemed timed to make a news splash ahead of the upcoming Super Bowl. (Why dubious? Well, the only major bettor was an undercover police officer, and the alleged bookie, Culosi, covered all the bets himself.)"
• WMATA is trying to cut $103 million from its 2009 budget. Michael Perkins at InfoSnack Headquarters breaks down the numbers. According to Perkins, "the largest increases in costs ($44 million) come from wage increases for unionized employees, which WMATA budgeting treats as sacrosanct." And while union employees will get a pay raise, hundreds of non-union employees will lose their jobs. UPDATE: WMATA will trim the ranks of union employees as welll.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user fdecomite.

Nobody was ever charged with any crimes in either the gambling investigation or the killing of Culosi, who was unarmed when he was gunned down in front of his house.

Culosi's death came during what felt like a spree of deadly and indictment-free police shootings in Northern Virginia.

Just five days before Culosi's killing, a civil jury had awarded the family of Prince Jones $3.7 million in a wrongful death suit.

Jones, an unarmed Howard U. student, was shot five times in the back in a Falls Church driveway in September 2000 by an undercover Prince George's County cop, Carlton Jones (no relation).

Fairfax County prosecutor Robert Horan, who later wouldn't bring charges in Culosi's killing, didn't charge Prince Jones' killer, either.

And only a month after Culosi was killed, unarmed 19-year-old Aaron Brown of Annandale was shot and killed in the parking lot of an International House of Pancakes by Carl Stowe, an off-duty Alexandria police officer.

Brown was in the backseat of a car full of friends who were accused of trying to run out without paying a $26 check when Stowe fired the fatal shot into the side of the vehicle.

Had one of the restaurant's waiters or short order cooks gunned down a patron under the exact same circumstances, murder indictments would surely have followed. No charges were filed against Stowe, who was working at the IHOP as a security guard when he killed Brown.

Stowe's other employer, the city of Alexandria, paid a $1.1 million settlement to Brown's family.

In Greece, one such police shooting — the killing in December of an unarmed 19-year-old student by an Athens cop — sparked a month of riots that has left governments all over Europe afraid.

Other than some quiet protests organized by some of Jones' Howard classmates, the three Northern Virginia killings inspired no civil disobedience.

Perhaps that's why these things happen more around here?