This article is more than 8 months old

This article is more than 8 months old

West Virginia’s governor has fired 34 correction officer trainees who were photographed giving a Nazi salute, and he fired their instructor. He also says four instructors are being suspended without pay.

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Republican governor Jim Justice announced his decision Monday after receiving a report from state investigators that the trainees regularly gave the Nazi salute “as a sign of respect” for their instructor in the weeks prior to the release of the photo. Its release earlier this month triggered widespread outrage.

“As I said from the beginning, I condemn the photo … in the strongest possible terms,” Justice said in a statement Monday. “I also said that this act needed to result in real consequences – terminations and dismissals. This kind of behavior will not be tolerated on my watch in any agency of state government.”

A three-page executive summary was released Monday detailing the state’s inquiry into the image.

The summary determined that an unnamed number of trainees in Academy Class 18 began using the hand gesture in the second or third week of training “as a sign of respect” for their correctional academy instructor, Karrie Byrd. Other classmates then began using the gesture.

Justice said Byrd has been fired.

According to the summary, Byrd told investigators that she was unaware of the hand gesture’s historical and racial implications and said she thought it was a greeting.

However, other interviewers seem to contradict Byrd’s statement.

When Byrd asked a secretary to print the photo with the caption “Hail Byrd,“ she was pressed by a secretary on what the class was doing, the report said. State investigators say Byrd responded with “because I’m a hardass like Hitler”.

Ultimately, investigators determined the cadets displayed “poor judgment” but concluded no one who participated in the gesture was being discriminatory.

The report concluded: “There is no dispute that the ‘Hail Byrd’ gesture and photograph were highly offensive and egregious in appearance, but the investigation did not reveal any overt motivation or intent that this was a discriminatory act towards any racial, religious, or ethnic group.”

As of Monday, only the summary had been released and not the full report. That means the names of the cadets and full names of those involved have not been made public.