Officials stated that when a state trooper in North Carolina made claims that seemed to be “false and misleading,” almost 200 cases were dismissed.
Garrett Lee Macario was the first trooper to be questioned. According to the station, Lorrin Freeman, the Wake County District Attorney, started looking into Macario’s reliability after he investigated a deadly crash in October.
“We received information the last week in December that there had been an accident, a one-car fatality on Capital Boulevard in October, in which the interaction of the trooper on scene had come into question,” Freeman stated.
Freeman stated that she then asked for the bodycam footage from the day of the accident. She stated after a review, “The trooper made statements that seem to be false and misleading.” After that, the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) began an investigation.
The state decided not to prosecute pending charges involving Macario, resulting in the dismissal of around 180 cases. According to Freeman, most of those cases were connected to DWI charges.
Freeman stated that one of the reasons the cases were dismissed was that DWI investigations are “pretty much one-witness cases.”
While reviewing Macario’s behavior, the reliability of his boss, Sergeant Matthew Morrison, was also called into question.
“Without getting into the details of this investigation, there was information in the body cam and dash cam video that I reviewed that also gave rise to concerns about his credibility,” Freeman stated of Morrison.
There were around twelve cases that were being examined. These cases featured Morrison, but they were not related to Macario’s case.
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The North Carolina State Highway Patrol reported that both Macario and Morrison were assigned to administrative duty, effective January 10. Macario has been with the organization since February 2019, and Morrison has been with the agency since July 2012.
As of January 24, neither of the troopers has been charged. The station also stated that, in addition to the SBI probe, it was likely that Highway Patrol will conduct an administrative investigation.