In January 2013, San Antonio police officer Robert Romo was pulled over while drunk, then climbed into the backseat of his car in an attempt to convince the officer that he was not driving.
After knocking on his tinted windows several times, the window was rolled down and San Antonio police Zachary Waters found an empty driver’s seat.
He also found Romo sitting in the back seat of his car while another man sat in the front passenger’s seat, both of them denying they had been driving.
Romo, who had a blood alcohol content of more than .15, almost twice the legal limit, was arrested anyway.
However, he managed to get the case dismissed, arguing that Waters had no probable cause to make the arrest, since he never actually saw him in the drivers seat.
His passenger, Raymond Ochoa, also denied he was driving, but also refused to admit that Romo was driving. Not that he was ever subpoenaed to testify.
Prosecutors appealed the dismissal, but an appeals court affirmed the decision in June 2015, ruling the arrest was unconstitutional based on the lack of probable cause that Romo was never seen driving the car, which Waters had pulled over after seeing it drive on the shoulder of the road to pass another car.
But the appeal took more than two years, a period in which Romo remained on indefinite suspension, meaning he was not getting paid.
However, after going through a “return-to-duty program,” which included a psychological examination, he was reinstated as a police officer on september 26.
And he was so happy about getting his job back that he went out and celebrated the following month, winding up in a bar brawl where another man ended up shot and Romo’s service gun ended up missing.
Romo disappeared by the time cops had arrived to the scene, not much different than how he managed to disappear from the driver’s seat of his car during his 2013 DWI arrest.
The incident took place on October 27, 2015, resulting on him being placed on paid administrative leave as police investigated whatever it was that took place that night.
Last month, after a four-month investigation, San Antonio Police Chief William McManus placed him back on indefinite suspension.
The local media refers to this as him being “fired,” but indefinite suspension certainly does not sounds as it provides the closure one would expect when getting fired.
Nevertheless, Romo was no longer on the payroll as of February 16, so we’ll just go with the term fired because as slick as he is, we don’t see him getting his job back this time around.
But police could still not get rid of him because two days later, he was involved in another incident at a bar that required police to “intervene,” resulting in him being “emergency detained,” but not charged.
But other than that, police are not saying much about that incident. And they have refused to release investigative documents from the October 2015 incident, even though that is now officially closed.
So that just leads us to assume his service gun is still missing. Along with the shooter who was never identified.
But police assure us it was not Romo.
After all, he was not there when they showed up.
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