Joevon Dawson shooting

The gun that Cleveland police said Joevon Dawson wielded outside a car when Cleveland police detective Jon Periandri shot him in June 2015 was found inside a console in the car, records show. Dawson's attorney says the man was unarmed when Periandri shot him.

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- New documents call into question the 2015 shooting of a drug suspect by a then-Cleveland police detective who would later plead guilty to his own drug charge and resign in a deal with Cuyahoga County prosecutors.

Cleveland police detective Jon Periandri shot Joevon Dawson June 30, 2015, outside of a car on Superior Avenue in East Cleveland.

Cleveland police originally said that Dawson pulled out a gun before Periandri opened fire, but records filed as part of an excessive force lawsuit brought against Periandri in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio show the only weapon recovered at the scene was inside a center console after the shooting.

The documents also show that Periandri entered into an agreement with Cuyahoga County prosecutors last week to plead guilty to a drug possession charge and receive drug treatment in lieu of a conviction.

That case was not entered into the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court's public docket until reporters began asking the prosecutor's office about the case on Monday. A spokeswoman there said the information was not entered into the system due to "an IT issue."

Periandri and assistant Cleveland law director Elizabeth Crook, who is representing Periandri in the suit, have denied that the shooting was excessive force.

The two sides in the lawsuit are set for a telephone conference Wednesday in Judge Dan Polster's courtroom.

The shooting

Periandri and other members of the Cleveland police gang unit got a tip about 7:45 p.m. June 30 that Dawson, who was wanted on a months-old drug trafficking warrant, was a passenger in Honda Civic driving along Superior Avenue, just over the border in East Cleveland, according to court records.

The officers spotted the car and stopped it, records say.

Six officers ordered three men in the Civic to get out of the car. Dawson, then 25, got out of the front passenger door, and Periandri shot Dawson once in the right armpit, according to court records.

Periandri was the only of the six officers to open fire.

Dawson ran through a yard and into a nearby parking lot where police arrested him. The officers found three baggies of suspected drugs in the yard that Dawson ran through, records say.

The gun

Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams said at the scene that Dawson was armed when he was shot.

"The suspect was ordered out of the vehicle, he produced a weapon and was shot by a Cleveland Police Officer," Cleveland police said in a news release the night of the shooting.

But a report written by the Ohio Attorney General's Office Bureau of Criminal Investigation, which helped East Cleveland police investigate the shooting, said that the only handgun found at the scene was the one an RTA police officer found inside the console of the Civic. The officer then took the gun out of the console and gave it to a Cleveland police sergeant at the scene, the report says.

The BCI report also notes that an RTA police officer moved a bullet casing found on the ground near the car, the report says.

Dawson's lawyer, Marcus Sidoti, said there's no way Dawson could have had the gun if it was found in the console, and questioned the department's statement that Dawson was armed.

"If that's what [Periandri] saw, why didn't the other officers shoot?" Sidoti asked.

Sidoti said Dawson had his hands raised in the air and was following police orders when Periandri shot him. He pointed to a photo that showed the wound from the bullet was in Dawson's upper right armpit, according to the lawsuit.

Dawson was arrested and charged with drug trafficking, mishandling of a firearm in a motor vehicle and having weapons under disability. He was not charged with felonious assault or resisting arrest. He later pleaded guilty to drug trafficking and being a felon in possession of a firearm and was sentenced to two years in prison.

Periandri's attorney in court records said that "no crime or policy violation has been found as a result of the Dawson shooting."

Periandri was never charged in East Cleveland. Department officials there did not return phone calls Monday seeking comment.

City spokesman Dan Wiliams said the internal investigation into the shooting remains ongoing, and said the department does not comment on ongoing investigations.

The texts

Periandri would soon face criminal investigation for another incident that happened in the weeks before and after the shooting.

In October 2015, as investigators continued probing the Dawson shooting, local and federal authorities raided the Seven Hills home of Alfonso Yunis, a suspected drug dealer.

Police found Yunis counting and crushing pills at his house along with then-Brooklyn law director Scott Clausen and attorney Brian Byrne, son of Parma Mayor Mike Byrne.

All three were arrested. A subsequent tip from a confidential police informant and a search of Yunis' cellphone turned up hundreds of text messages with a number that was later traced to Periandri, according to court records.

The messages appeared to be "criminal in nature" and showed Periandri, a detective in charge of investigating and arresting drug dealers, repeatedly requesting to buy prescription painkillers and heroin off of Yunis, and even agreeing to act as a middleman for some drug deals, according to a search warrant affidavit obtained by cleveland.com in December 2015.

Dawson's attorney entered the affidavit as evidence in the federal lawsuit on Thursday.

Messages seized from May 23, 2015 showed that Periandri ordered drugs while he working during protests in Cleveland that followed the acquittal of Cleveland police officer Michael Brelo on manslaughter charges in the 2012 killing of an unarmed couple. He also used a shorthand for what the affidavit describes as a racial slur to describe the protesters.

Cleveland police's internal affairs unit launched an investigation and, that same month, obtained a warrant to collect a hair sample from Periandri and have it tested for drugs.

But before they could execute the warrant, Periandri took a medical leave of absence and checked himself into a drug rehabilitation center in California, internal investigators wrote in the affidavit.

The deal

A May 13, 2016 email between from Cleveland police commander Brian Heffernan to Williams, the head of internal affairs Lt. Monroe Goins and another Cleveland police officer indicated that Periandri was in talks with Assistant Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Jim Gutierrez.

The two agreed that Periandri would be charged by information and plead guilty to a felony drug possession charge at a June 7 court hearing. He would receive treatment in lieu of conviction, the email says.

Periandri would then serve a year's probation, and the charge would be dropped from his record if he successfully completed treatment. In exchange, Periandri agreed to give up his certification to be a police officer.

But that court hearing never happened.

Prosecutors did not charge Periandri until Thursday, more than eight months after the original offer, according to court records. And the information was not delivered to the clerk's office until about 1:30 p.m. Monday, after reporters began asking the prosecutor's office about Periandri's case.

The information, signed by Gutierrez, Periandri and Periandri's attorney, Robert Dixon, is stamped Jan. 19. A note stuck on the outside of Periandri's file says the information was "back-dated" to Jan. 19.

Kathleen Caffrey, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office, said on Monday that Periandri had been charged by information and pleaded guilty in June.

After a reporter asked for a copy of the information and more information about the court hearing on Tuesday, she called to say that she had misinterpreted a conversation with Gutierrez and that no June agreement was reached.

Periandri was allowed to retire from the department for medical reasons on Aug. 9, 2016, Williams said.

To comment on this story, please visit Monday's crime and courts comments page.

Correction: Due to an error by a Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office spokeswoman, an earlier version of this story misstated when prosecutors charged Jon Periandri by information with drug possession. He was charged on Jan. 19.