Virginia State Police say the background check failed to turn up a report that Austin Lee Edwards had threatened the lives of himself and his father 5 years before he entered the academy.
Virginia State Police officials admitted Wednesday, Dec. 7, that they botched the background check that allowedof a Riverside family in November, to enter the agency’s academy in 2021.
Edwards, in applying for the academy, did not disclose the incident that happened in a small town on Virginia’s southern border. And the report was not discovered during the background check because “human error resulted in an incomplete database query during Edwards’ hiring process,” Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said in a news release.
But the discovery of the report likely would have caused police to reject Edwards for the academy, he said. Edwards graduated from the Virginia State Police Academy on Jan. 21, 2022, and passed written, psychological and physical testing, as well as a lie-detector test, before beingThe Washington County Sheriff’s Office then hired Edwards on Nov. 16, and he was going through orientation before being assigned to the patrol division, the Sheriff’s Office said. No past employer disclosed any trouble, discipline or investigations during the background check, Washington County Sheriff Blake Andis has said.
Edwards drove away with the girl and later that day killed himself during a confrontation with San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies in the Mojave Desert.Police have not disclosed how the Wineks were slain.No one can say how events surrounding the crime would have been altered had Edwards been disqualified from a career in law enforcement, as he did not represent himself to the Riverside girl as a police officer.
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