Deputy confiscates woman’s cell phone
He feared it had been modified into a gun
Friday, July 30, 2010 02:54 AM
By Randy Ludlow
The Columbus Dispatch
Melissa Greenfield was videotaping the deputy.
When a deputy sheriff began questioning Melissa Greenfield’s boyfriend at a Delaware County truck stop, she began recording video with her cell phone.
She never thought that she, or her phone, could be viewed as a danger as she documented the activities of public employees in a public place.
“I’m a 115-pound, 20-year-old girl wearing a cervical collar with nothing but a cell phone. I was not going to harm any officer,” Greenfield said yesterday.
However, a sheriff’s sergeant saw the situation differently after Greenfield announced that she was recording video “for legal purposes and our own safety.”
Sgt. Jonathan Burke wrote that he repeatedly ordered Greenfield to place the “unknown” object in her pocket and keep her hands free. When Greenfield refused, she was arrested and charged with obstructing official business and resisting arrest.
Burke wrote in his report that he feared that Greenfield could have been holding a dangerous object such as a “cell-phone gun.”
However, neither the sheriff’s office nor the Columbus office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has ever come across one of the black-market devices that apparently are made in Eastern Europe.
Burke ultimately determined that Greenfield’s cell phone was not the exotic stuff of James Bond but a simple T-Mobile device.
In a statement, Delaware County Sheriff Walter L. Davis III said that cell-phone guns are an example of everyday items that have been altered into deceptive weapons that endanger the safety of officers and the public.
“When a sheriff’s deputy encounters an individual holding something in his or her hand, the deputy will take action to identify the item. This is done for the safety of the deputy, the involved parties and the public,” Davis wrote.
After Greenfield got her phone back, she said, the video she took of the deputies at the Flying J truck stop at I-71 and Rt. 37 on July 9 had been deleted, along with a couple of vacation videos.
Deputies did not delete any video, Davis said. A warrant would have been required to search the phone, and one was not obtained, he said.
The sheriff’s cruisers are not equipped with dashboard recording systems, so there is no public video to document what occurred. However, through a grant, more than 30 cruisers soon will have cameras.
In Delaware Municipal Court on July 13, Greenfield’s public defender deemed it “ridiculous” that she might have had a cell-phone gun. Greenfield, who lives in Poway, Calif., pleaded no contest to obstructing official business. She was fined $20 and released with time served: three days in jail. The resisting-arrest charge was dropped.
Greenfield said her no-contest plea was one of convenience to allow her to return home to receive treatment for her neck, which had been injured in a car wreck a few days earlier.
She and her boyfriend, Colton Dorich, were driving back to California when their truck ran low on gasoline and they pulled into the truck stop. Dorich, 19, of Conover, Wis., began walking his dog along Rt. 37 while displaying a sign asking passing motorists for money. That triggered a call to the sheriff’s office.
Burke arrived, questioned Dorich and then accompanied him back to his truck so the young man could get his ID. Burke wrote that Greenfield began to intervene and asked Dorich, who was not charged, for her cell phone.
“Not knowing what the item in her hand was and having prior knowledge of all types of hidden weapons, including a cell-phone gun, I asked her several times to place it in her pocket and to keep her hands free,” Burke wrote.
Greenfield said that, while driving her to the jail, Burke said that it was “unacceptable for me to be filming his activities.”
“I wish I could be surprised,” she said, “but I’ve heard so many stories of incidents like this happening before. ... There’s no law against videotaping police encounters.”
Not that cervix, the other cervix.