FBI has opened official investigation into Asheville police beating

ASHEVILLE - An FBI investigation is underway into a city police beating of a resident, according to officials with the state's top law enforcement agency.

The federal investigation will almost certainly center around a potential civil rights violation of city resident Johnnie Rush who was beaten, stunned and choked by Asheville Police Department officer Chris Hickman after Rush was stopped the night of Aug. 24 for allegedly jaywalking and trespassing through the parking lot of a business that was closed for the night. Race has played a role in the outrage that followed. Rush is African-American and Hickman is white.

The news of FBI involvement came in a statement from the State Bureau of Investigation to the Citizen Times Wednesday night.

"The SBI has been requested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist them with a criminal investigation," said the statement from SBI spokeswoman Patty McQuillan.

It came the same night Police Chief Tammy Hooper said at a packed public meeting that firings were coming and that she would resign if community members demand it.

The SBI statement was in response to questions from the Citizen Times about Director Bob Schurmeier's recent discussions with District Attorney Todd Williams.

Williams wanted the SBI to take over the Asheville Police Department's criminal investigation of Hickman.

Here is the statement:

"The SBI has been requested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist them with a criminal investigation. The SBI director has discussed this with the district attorney and has declined to open a separate state investigation at this time given that the SBI is already assisting with a federal criminal investigation which will encompass most, if not all, of the issues set forth in the district attorney’s request. A second state investigation would likely duplicate much of the results of the ongoing federal investigation."

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FBI agents from the Charlotte office visited Rush in January and interviewed him for more than hour, Rush told the Citizen Times in a Feb. 28 interview.

The bureau's protocol is to conduct a preliminary inquiry before an investigation and it wasn't clear what stage the bureau had reached, one expert said.

A spokeswoman for the Charlotte office referred questions Saturday to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Monday justice department spokesman Devin O'Malley declined to comment, saying the department doesn't confirm or deny the existence or non existence of investigations.

Hooper could not be reached for comment Wednesday night.

FBI involvement in local police activities usually has two justifications: suspicion of police extortion or an alleged civil rights violation, according to David Shapiro, a former FBI special agent and assistant legal adviser who is now a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

The FBI gets involved because the civil rights violation is a federal crime — and because sometimes there is a concern of conflict of interest with local police, Shapiro said.

District Attorney Williams also didn't respond to a text seeking comment.

The SBI had already declined two requests by APD and Williams to take the case. For more than a month, the bureau offered no explanation for why it said no.

But on Friday, the SBI said the fact that police waited five months to contact them and that the APD had already conducted a non-criminal internal investigation leading to Hickman's resignation would make it too hard to investigate.

Hooper responded that the length of time and presence of an internal investigation shouldn't matter.

It is not clear now what will happen with APD's criminal investigation into Hickman. A preliminary version of the investigation has already been given to Williams.

But Williams has said he didn't want APD doing the investigation. Medium-sized departments like APD can legally do criminal investigations of its own officers, but some departments avoid it because of potential bias or appearance of bias.