Tough call: Should PD have gone public with attack details?

I’d never before had the victim of a violent crime ask me this question: “Can you tell me why this story hasn’t been in the news yet?”

Heather Owens was the victim of a brutal Aug. 28 assault in the backyard of her Florence Avenue home. The case remains at this writing unsolved.

I met with Owens, the owner of a Downtown Waynesboro business, Natural Beauty Studio, on Tuesday to discuss the case and the ongoing investigation. The details as to the latest in the investigation are somewhat sketchy – she knows that investigators have sent DNA evidence collected at the scene to the state crime lab in Richmond for analysis and that several acquaintances and others that she had been in contact with the day of the incident have submitted DNA samples as part of the forensics investigation.

She has also looked through several books of mug shots on file at the Waynesboro Police Department and determined a possible match with one “with about 85 percent certainty.”

She doesn’t know who it was who attacked her, though, she said, and she wonders if the investigation might not be helped along if the police department publicized the case through the local media.

I raised that issue with Sgt. Kelly Walker, the department’s media liaison.

“That’s a valid point to raise,” said Walker, explaining to me the rationale for not having gone public with the details of the Owens assault prior to our inquiry.

The investigation is currently focusing in on several potential suspects, Walker said, and though he couldn’t provide details he indicated that authorities are reasonably confident that they are zeroing in on solving the crime.

I next raised the issue of potential dangers to the local community of having the perpetrator of a violent assault still walking the streets pending the resolution to the case. Walker said the Owens case “didn’t seem to rise to the level that would require a public alert, if you will.”

“If we had indications that this was an assault that had been perpetrated by a stranger, that would rise to that level. But we don’t have that sense at this point in time,” Walker said.

There is a bit of a disconnect in that statement from Walker and the point stressed to me repeatedly in talking with Owens that she doesn’t know her attacker. I can’t make any kind of solid independent judgment on the reason for the disconnect because the police report on the attack is not being made public due to the sensitive nature of the ongoing investigation into the case.

I wish I could give Owens a better answer to her question, but there really is no easy answer. For Owens, it’s obviously a living nightmare for her until an arrest and conviction. For the police, they’re really damned if they do and damned if they don’t; going public can risk compromising their investigation, on the one hand, and keeping things close to the vest risks them being wrong about the suspect being someone they know and having to start from scratch if that assumption turns out to be incorrect.

I’ll leave it here at the police know how to do their job better than I know how to do their job, and I hope they’re getting this one right.

Related posts:

1. Waynesboro’s loss, Shenandoah County’s gain