“Today is surely one of the tough days.” An emotional West Virginia Governor Jim Justice talked to reporters Monday about the sudden ‘resignation’ of State Police Superintendent Jan Cahill. Col. J. L. Cahill was replaced at 10:00 AM by the Deputy Chief of Protective Services & Capitol Police Jack Chambers, who will investigate both Cahill and a number of trooper-related incidents.
Apparently the Governor spoke with former chief Cahill at Cahill’s request on Monday morning, while “sitting in the driveway” of the Governor’s Mansion on the Capitol grounds. Justice informed Cahill “there is no pathway here” for Cahill’s continued employment.
Cahill had run the West Virginia State Police since Justice’s administration began in 2017. He was a former Greenbrier County Sheriff with over 23 years in the State Police and Protective Services bureaus, starting as a state trooper in 1989. While the exact cause of Cahill’s removal is still obscure, his own investigations of three or four major scandals seem to have triggered the dismissal. Jim Justice had alluded to issues emerging around the Colonel last week, saying “(Cahill has) been a friend and you know I hope to goodness that the investigation comes in differently than I think it’s going to come in, but I don’t think this is going to be a good day for several folks once it’s completed.”
State news outlets have pointed to four scandals that had emerged publicly and were being addressed by Chief Cahill before his sudden exit Monday morning. Apparently, a (now deceased) West Virginia state trooper had put a video camera in a woman’s restroom and later another state trooper destroyed the thumb drive containing the film. According to Justice the officer reviewing the digital graphics, “jerked the thumb drive out, threw it to the floor and started stomping on it. You can’t make this stuff up, can you? Now we’ve got law enforcement officers destroying evidence . . . we’re better than this.”
Another incident involved a state trooper pocketing a Charleston man’s cash envelope at a Nitro casino, where the gambler had dropped the money and the trooper kept it. “Basically any way you cut it, that money was stolen,” the governor said, saying the division should have started an investigation “and we didn’t do that.”
The third and fourth incidents that Cahill was about to conclude reviews on involved police brutality. In one incident a teenager was beaten after striking a cruiser and precipitating a police pursuit. Two troopers and two deputies were removed (but reinstated) in that case. In a second violent incident a Maryland pedestrian was injured in police custody on I-81 and died. Justice, who has seen cam footage of this fatal encounter, said it is “very, very concerning … and (new State Police Commander) Jack Chambers has to get into this as well … I can promise you the feds are already looking at that stuff.”
“I stand with and behind our police on every issue — up to the point in time when it goes beyond what is right,” Justice said, and when asked about discharged Superintendent Cahill the Governor stated, “while there surely was good, there’s surely bad judgment at this point in time. Bad judgment leads to bad things.”