Pictures Point to Sheriff's Deputy in Fatal Crash, But Civilian is Blamed
A convicted sexual predator who previously worked as a deputy for the Polk County Sheriff’s Office may have caused a fatal accident in Florida for which a civilian has been blamed.
Traffic accident reconstruction experts who reviewed photographs kept by attorneys of the Volkswagen Passat involved in the the six-year-old crash say the pictures, along with other evidence and court testimony, show that it apparently was hit by a car driven by then-Deputy Scott Lawson before it went off the road, reports the St. Petersburg Times.
A sheriff’s office investigation found that the Passat was involved in a single-car accident that killed a 16-year-old passenger when it hit some trees. The 18-year-old driver accepted a plea deal that resulted in a sentence of probation and allowed him to keep his driver’s license.
Neither the driver nor Lawson, who is now jailed in Vermont, would discuss the accident with the newspaper. Lawson had been chasing the teens in his unmarked car at high speed prior to the accident, and his accident report contains several factual errors, the newspaper states.
The article suggests that the sheriff’s office may have been biased in its investigation, at least in part because Lawson had been accused, a few weeks before the accident, of insisting while on duty that another teenage boy strip naked. “If it could be proven that on duty, in his unmarked car, he caused a crash that killed a teenager, a wrongful death lawsuit could have cost Polk County millions of dollars,” the Times writes.
In response to a previous Times article that raised some of the same issues, sheriff’s attorney Hank Campbell wrote to the newspaper saying that the one-car accident was fully investigated and any claim to the contrary is “pure and obviously malicious fiction.”
