Sandy police defend domestic violence policies

SANDY — Sandy Police Chief Kevin Thacker on Tuesday defended his department's policies dealing with domestic violence cases following the shooting deaths of a mother and her son, and the wounding of two other children.

But Thacker, along with Ned Searle, director of the State Office on Domestic and Sexual Violence, also noted that a working group is being assembled to consider charges to not only how stalking injunctions are granted, but also how domestic relationships are defined.

On June 6, Memorez Rackley, 39, and her 6-year-old son Jase were shot and killed in their Sandy neighborhood shortly after Rackley had picked up her children from school. Myles Rackley, 11, was also shot in the neck but survived. The 8-year-old daughter of a woman who had stopped to try and help the Rackleys was also shot. The girl was briefly hospitalized.

Jeremy Patterson, 32, who had been harassing and sending threatening messages to Rackely, was the man responsible for the murders. He shot and killed himself after shooting the four people.

Memorez Rackley and Patterson were involved in a relationship that she had recently broken off. In threatening social media posts in the days leading up the attack, Patterson wrote that he loved Rackley but was upset the woman had kept their six-month relationship a secret. Rackley and her husband had quietly separated months prior to the shooting but continued living in close proximity.

On June 3, Rackley contacted Sandy police three times about harassing phone calls and texts she was receiving from Patterson. Officers talked to Rackley, but they handled the call as a telephone harassment case and not a domestic violence case because they said that under Utah law, the two did not have a domestic relationship.

The Utah Domestic Violence Coalition said a series of 11 questions that police agencies ask to determine the threat assessment of a situation were missed because Sandy police do not use the coalition's program. Had Sandy police used that protocol, the coalition's director said it would have flagged Rackley as being in danger.

Thacker said that is not true. He said his department has been using a different program, the Lethality Assessment Protocol, since 2010, even before the Utah Domestic Violence Coalition's program was created. The chief said it is essentially the same program that requires officers to ask a series of questions and provide a victim the appropriate help and resources based on their answers.

But Thacker said neither protocol would have worked in this case because it was not considered a domestic relationship. Searle said the state has already begun the process of re-examining who qualifies for a stalking injunction and what the state definition is for an "intimate partner."

"It’s fairly old. It probably needs some updating, some language added to provide extra safety, especially as technology has changed greatly in the last five or 10 years. I think this will give us the opportunity to do that,” Searle said of the state's stalking injunction policy.

He wants state language to conform more with the federal definition of intimate partner so there is more opportunity for better protection to be provided. Under Searle's proposal, the new state definition for "intimate partner" would include a person "who has been or is in a romantic, dating or sexual relationship."

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Even if this case had been considered a domestic violence situation, Thacker said the only difference is that a domestic violence advocate would have responded to Rackley's house.

The Sandy chief said in the three times Rackley contacted his office June 3, the most she asked for was for officers to tell Patterson to stop harassing her, which they did.

"We did the things we would normally do in these types of situations,” he said.

Rackley refused officers' offers to take her to a safe place — such as a shelter or hotel — and they had an officer conduct extra patrols around her house, Thacker said. He emphasized Tuesday that police cannot force someone to leave their house. He also said Rackley had begun filling out paperwork to file a protective order, but hadn't finished it.

Even if the threat assessment protocol was put into place and the incident was defined as domestic violence, Thacker said he isn't sure it would have made a difference. He emphasized Tuesday that the only person to blame for the tragedy is Patterson.

"This was a man who was very set on doing this. There was no question that what he was going to do was going to happen,” he said. "I don’t know if anything could have stopped him from doing that, aside from, maybe, having someone with her all the time."

Likewise, Thacker isn't sure if the information Draper police received three hours before the shootings could have prevented the outcome.

A woman who knew Patterson and asked to remain anonymous said she received text messages from the man the day of the shootings telling her what he intended to do. She called police.

The tipster also told a member of Patterson's family about his messages, but she didn't know whether they had reached out to police. She told the Deseret News that Patterson's sister had said the family was aware of how Patterson was acting.

A Draper police report indicates an officer tried calling the woman back but couldn't reach her, and that there were too many men named Jeremy Patterson in the state to figure out which one she was referring to.

The six-minute 911 call the woman made was released on Tuesday. In it, she asks to talk to an officer about the texts.

"Nothing has actually happened, but someone has been texting me saying that, like, they just broke up with their girlfriend and they said something about trying to kill her and then himself. I mentioned this to a family member of his, so they’re aware,” she said, noting that the texts contained "all sorts of crazy, scary things."

"I’m just trying to make sure (police know) in case anything else does happen,” she said.

At first, the woman could not remember Patterson's address, only that he lived in Draper. At one point in the call, she seems to remember it and is ready to give it to the dispatcher, but the dispatcher moves on to other questions. The dispatcher later tells her that when an officer calls her, to give him the address.

The dispatcher tells the woman that when the officer calls, the number might appear on caller ID as "restricted" or "out of area." The woman tells the dispatcher she has a class and will the officer call back if she doesn't answer. The dispatcher tells her in the call that the officer would likely "clear" the call if that happened, and that if she doesn't hear from an officer by the afternoon, she should call them back.

The officer said in his report he tried calling back but said he could not reach the woman. The woman said she didn't have any missed calls or voicemails suggesting that police had tried to talk to her.

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