Lawyers for relatives of the teen kidnapped by Austin Lee Edwards allege the Virginia State Police 'buried' his failed mental health exam before hiring him.
Austin Lee Edwards said he checked into a mental health hospital in 2016. Further inquiry might have kept him from becoming an officer, a police official said.
“Virginia completely dropped the ball,” Ring said in a statement. “There is no law enforcement agency in the country that would have hired Austin Lee Edwards, given his mental health history,” he added. “Edwards was forbidden by the courts to possess a gun. Virginia gave him a gun, a badge, and the ability to commit these heinous murders.”Years before the Riverside killings, ‘catfish’ cop Austin Lee Edwards groomed, stalked and solicited nude pictures from a teen girl.
The legal notices sent to Virginia say that the family, which is also being advised by El Segundo-based attorney Alison Polin Saros, intends to sue the state and Washington County, whose sheriff’s office employed Edwards at the time of his death. The notices cited gross negligence in Edwards’ hiring and claimed damages of more than $100 million.
“How is it possible that not one but two Virginia law enforcement agencies not only hired a person who was automatically disqualified from carrying a gun, but then trained him in police tactics and investigations, which allowed him to gain access to the family and carry out the brutal murders,” Saros wrote in a statement.
Edwards was employed by the state police for just nine months before he resigned on Oct. 28 and joined the Washington County Sheriff’s Office as a patrol deputy on Nov. 16. He had worked at the sheriff’s office for less than two weeks when he killed the Wineks in Riverside.
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