A DeKalb County police officer who is on restricted duty pending the outcome of a use of force investigation had more than a dozen previous incidents, Channel 2 Action News reported Monday.
Officer P.J. Larscheid has been with DeKalb police more than five years and in that time he used force 14 times, including euthanizing a deer with a firearm in 2011, according to the personnel file obtained by Channel 2.
Use of force doesn’t always mean a complaint was filed.
The officer wasn’t reprimanded for shooting the deer because it had been seriously injured in a car accident.
After Larscheid cursed at a man during a theft investigation in 2012 and when he failed to take a recovered car off the stolen car list in 2014, the officer was written up, according to his personnel file.
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But he wasn’t reprimanded after complaints of bloodying a suspect’s nose in January 2015 nor for choking a suspect in April 2015. His file also states he struck a domestic violence suspect several times in May of that year.
Some complaints in Larscheid’s file were unfounded, but, in September of 2015, Larscheid shot a man who allegedly refused to drop a weapon. He was cleared of any wrongdoing in that incident on Glenwood Road, which is not far from where a witness recorded video of Larscheid striking Katie McCrary inside a Chevron store in June.
McCrary was accused of soliciting money from store patrons and the video shows the officer strike the 38-year-old woman while she is on the ground for more than 1 minute.
Her husband, Anthony McCrary told Channel 2 he thinks the beating was wrong.
“It was a male beating on a woman,” he said. “And he did not need to use that much force.”
Despite a previous internal investigation clearing Larscheid, the video led officials to reopen the case in July. The GBI's investigation has been hindered by an inability to locate McCrary after she bonded out of jail on an unrelated charge of prostitution.
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