Officer wins reinstatement

The City of Springfield is asking a judge to overturn the decision of an arbitrator who has ruled that a police officer fired after testing positive for steroids must be reinstated.

Loren Pettit was the first officer in the history of the department to test positive for illegal drugs, according to city officials. He was ordered reinstated in January after several prominent people, including Ward 3 Ald. Doris Turner, testified on his behalf during a November arbitration hearing.

In a lawsuit filed last month, the city says that Pettit should lose his job. Among other things, the city says, Pettit’s credibility would be an issue if he had to testify in a drug case.

After testing positive for nandrolone, a steroid, and clenbuterol, an asthma drug commonly used to lose weight and banned as a performance enhancer in the Olympics, professional cycling and major league baseball, Pettit was suspended and ultimately fired in June of last year. He was assigned to work at Southeast High School when he was suspended.

Pettit came to the attention of internal affairs in November 2013, after his live-in girlfriend accused him of beating her and said that he was injecting himself with steroids. Investigators found a syringe in Pettit’s house.

An investigator who searched Pettit’s patrol car found human chorionic gonadotropin, or HCG, a diet aid that boosts testosterone levels lowered by steroid use. The substance was the basis for a 50-game suspension given to former Los Angeles Dodger Manny Ramirez in 2009. During the November hearing, Pettit testified that he did not know that HCG is illegal without a prescription.

Pettit testified that Sean McCaffrey, a Springfield chiropractor, gave him a prescription for HCG after the FDA banned over-thecounter distribution in 2011 and declared that the substance, contrary to claims by sellers, isn’t effective in reducing weight. Pettit also testified that Chief Kenny Winslow used HCG, as did the chief’s secretary, and that he had talked about HCG with the chief “on many occasions.”

Winslow refused to discuss the case on the grounds that it is a personnel matter, although he did deny using HCG.

“I’ve never used anything,” the chief said. Chiropractors can’t prescribe drugs in Illinois.

On his website, McCaffrey refers to himself as Dr. Sean McCaffrey and tells would-be customers that his patients lose as much as 35 pounds in six weeks with the help of a “doctor-developed dietary supplement” called ChiroThin. He could not be reached for comment.

At the November hearing, Pettit testified that he had never knowingly taken steroids but had injected himself with a liquid and swallowed pills that were given to him by Kenneth Wyatt, who ran a gym called the Dungeon Training Center. The gym was popular with cops, Pettit said.

“There were a lot of police officers that went to Mr. Wyatt from the sheriff’s department and from the Springfield Police Department,” Pettit said.

Pettit testified that he took HCG from McCaffrey and steroids obtained from Wyatt, who died in 2011, because he wanted to lose weight. He said he had struggled with weight all his life to the point that he had once considered bariatric surgery. At the time of the November hearing, he said that he weighed 330 pounds and had weighed as much as 362 pounds.

Pettit said that he trusted Wyatt and thought of him as an uncle, and so he didn’t ask questions when the gym owner told him that an injectable liquid and pills delivered in a plastic bag would speed up his metabolism and help him lose weight.

“If…a student you knew at Southeast had come up to you and said ‘Officer Pettit, a friend of mine, who I trust, gave me a baggy of white pills, do you have any advice for me before I start taking them,’ what would your advice be?” assistant corporation counsel Steve Rahn asked Pettit during the hearing.

“Being a juvenile, I would tell them to talk to their parents or to the administrators,” Pettit replied.

Wyatt was well known in Springfield and worked as a strength and conditioning coach at Southeast High School in 2010, according to his online obituary and Springfield School District 186. At least one Springfield police officer wrote online condolences, praising Wyatt’s skill as a trainer, as did a City Water, Light and Power manager, newly elected Ward 10 Ald. Ralph Hanauer and Kevin Davlin, the brother of former mayor Tim Davlin.

“He had a lot of professional people that he trained,” Hanauer said. “It was pretty amazing when you walked in there and saw some of the people he trained.”

Wyatt ran his gym in converted garage space on the city’s east side, according to Hanauer and testimony in the arbitration hearing. Hanauer, who recalls Wyatt as the Dungeon Master, said that he would be shocked if he had given steroids to anyone.

“He was totally against it,” Hanauer said.

“In fact, he talked about other gyms that did it. … When I worked out, I didn’t see anyone there who even fit the profile. There was no one who was blown up and doing all kinds of crazy stuff.”

Called to vouch for Pettit’s character and reputation, Ald. Turner in November testified that he is an honest person who doesn’t drink, do drugs or engage in violence.

“I think that he has always been regarded as a bright, truthful person, a person of high integrity, dependable,” Turner told the arbitrator. “I’ve never known him to be a violent person, I have never known him to have any reputation for being a violent person.”

Under questioning from Rahn, Turner said that she didn’t know Pettit’s live-in girlfriend, who showed up at the police station with a black eye and a knot on her head and suggested that steroid use might have prompted the officer to punch her. Investigators from the Sangamon County sheriff’s office were assigned to the case, but prosecutors filed no charges. Internal affairs investigators, however, determined that Pettit had beaten the woman. The city did not seek termination based on allegations of domestic violence. In November, Chief Winslow testified that he likely would not have fired Pettit if his only offense had been beating his girlfriend, given that another officer on the force had kept his job despite engaging in domestic violence.

Corporation counsel J. Todd Greenburg said that the city did not seek termination in November because the girlfriend wasn’t cooperative. He declined to elaborate.

Teresa Haley, head of the Springfield chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People who lost a bid for the city council last month, testified that Pettit was “well-respected” and “truthful.” Edgar Knox, a Sangamon County sheriff’s deputy, also vouched for Pettit, a man known as “Big Loren” whose father is a retired Springfield cop. Lt. William Guard of the Illinois State Police, who grew up with Pettit and is related to him via marriage, said that Pettit is honest and a teetotaler. Daryl Morrison, assistant pastor at Emmanuel Temple Church of God in Christ, told the arbitrator that Pettit is a regular churchgoer who reminds him of a teddy bear.

Internal affairs investigators, however, found that Pettit was less than forthright, writing in a report that he was “uncooperative and unwilling” to allow sheriff’s deputies access to a locked drawer in his home where his girlfriend said steroids were kept. Investigators also wrote that Pettit changed his story, first saying that he had never injected himself and later admitting that he had, although he held fast to his claim that he didn’t know that he was taking steroids.

Pettit claimed that his girlfriend had blackened her own eye in an attempt to get him in trouble, but investigators noted that she waited six days before reporting the incident to police and that she initially told skeptical doctors at St. John’s Hospital that she had fallen. The girlfriend told investigators that Pettit had told her that no one would believe her and that she didn’t believe that police would help her because “everyone know(s) Loren and they wouldn’t care.” Investigators also determined that Pettit had disobeyed a direct order from a lieutenant by texting his girlfriend after being told that he was not to have contact of any kind with her.

Testimony from Pettit’s supporters helped sway arbitrator Doyle O’Connor, who overturned the termination decision and instead ordered a 15-day suspension.

“He previously had a sterling reputation in the community, as evidenced by a truly impressive array of individuals both influential and well respected in the community who testified as to his reputation and in particular his reputation for truthfulness,” O’Connor wrote in his decision.

But that didn’t mean that O’Connor believed that Pettit was being truthful when he testified that he didn’t know that he had done anything wrong.

“He was popping pills and injecting himself with pharmaceuticals provided, not by a doctor, but by a trainer at his gym,” O’Connor wrote. “The suggestion was floated that Pettit’s ingestion of steroids was akin to having someone slip something into your drink at a bar. This was no spiked drink at a bar. It was closer to snorting an unknown white crystalline powder off the bar because others were doing so. … Pettit asserted that the trainer told him that the substances would ‘speed up his metabolism and suppress his appetite’ and that he did not ask the trainer what the products were. As a police officer he should have suspected steroids, if not amphetamines.”

The arbitrator concluded that Pettit was aware that he had crossed the line “I find that at some level, Pettit knew what he was doing and what sort of substances he was taking,” O’Connor wrote. “He simply was not surprised that he tested positive for steroid use after injecting and ingesting drugs provided by his trusted ‘uncle’ at the gym.”

O’Connor determined that HCG was common in the Springfield Police Department, but he didn’t consider whether Pettit should be disciplined for possessing the substance banned without a prescription. Nor did he rule on whether Pettit’s positive test for clenbuterol, which is not on the department’s list of banned substances, merited discipline. The city asked only that Pettit be fired for testing positive for nandrolone, which is on the list of banned substances contained in the department’s contract with the police union.

The maximum penalty for a first offense for unauthorized use of oxycodone, a prescription painkiller, is a five-day suspension, according to the arbitrator. The same would be true for such powerful and potentially addictive prescription drugs as Dilaudid that do not appear in the collective gargaining agreement’s banned list, according to Greenburg, the city’s top lawyer.

If a drug isn’t specifically banned by the city’s collective bargaining agreement with police and it can be obtained with a prescription, the maximum punishment for a positive test on a first offense is a five-day suspension, even if an officer doesn’t have a prescription, Greenburg said. Possession of oxycodone and similar prescription painkillers without a prescription is a crime generally treated as a felony, according to Sangamon County state’s attorney John Milhiser.

In the Pettit case, the arbitrator was left with a positive test for nandrolone, which is in the department’s list of banned substances. And O’Connor decided that use of the steroid was “more in the category of foolhardy than criminal,” “reckless rather than outrageous.” The arbitrator noted that steroid possession in Illinois is a misdemeanor.

“It is more akin to driving after ingesting too many ‘legal’ beers than it is to the use of street drugs,” O’Connor wrote. “Further, while a police officer failing a drug test is always a matter of grave concern, this is not a case involving the knowing use of heroin, cocaine, meth or the like.”

In finding for Pettit, O’Connor considered 18 previous incidents of misconduct by Springfield police officers that had not resulted in dismissal. Details in court documents are sparse, but the cases included several instances of drunken driving, a drunken officer who caused a disturbance and an officer who was found driving drunk with a suspected prostitute in his car. Another officer, while on duty and in uniform, had stolen something – it isn’t clear from court documents just what – from a charity. An officer who left his four young children unattended at home while he retrieved his drunken wife from a bar and allowed her to drive home while he followed, then allegedly assaulted her, all while on duty, also kept his job. Another officer falsified federal gun sales records to help a friend and wasn’t fired. Just one of the officers was terminated, according to records filed in Sangamon County Circuit Court, but an arbitrator ordered reinstatement. And Pettit’s misdeeds, O’Connor decided, weren’t dissimilar.

“There is no meaningful distinction between the unlawfulness or inappropriateness of these officers’ conduct and that of Pettit,” O’Connor wrote.