Camden officer's illegal acts began after shooting

All Kevin Michael Parry wanted to do, he wrote in his Gloucester City High School yearbook in 1999, was "to go to college, play baseball and become a cop."

Parry played third base for the high school team and was cocaptain of the football squad, leading it to an 11-1 season, the most successful in school history.

But his career as a police officer, wearing Badge No. 1294 for the Camden Police Department, was not marked by the same success.

After a semester at Camden County College and a stint as a corrections officer at the Camden County Jail, Parry joined the Camden force in 2006 and, about six months later, fatally shot a gunman in an incident that remains under investigation.

Almost as soon as he returned to patrol after a mandatory administrative leave, Parry began the illegal behavior that is at the heart of a federal probe into Camden police corruption, according to his court testimony.

In pleading guilty to federal conspiracy charges in court Friday, Parry said that he and at least four other officers planted evidence and threatened suspects with arrest if they did not provide information about drug dealers. Parry admitted stealing drugs and money and giving drugs to prostitutes in exchange for help in investigations.

To back up their actions, Parry wrote bogus police reports, then lied in criminal court. As a result, the Camden County Prosecutor's Office has overturned 185 convictions and pending charges, and scores of people with criminal records have been released from prison.

"They were a wrecking crew that succeeded in wrecking themselves and the whole police department," said retired Lt. Jim Phillips, who supervised Parry and the other officers under investigation.

Phillips once believed his officers were aggressive lawmen being wrongfully accused. Now, he thinks otherwise.

"How do you face yourself in the mirror in the morning knowing that last night you fabricated evidence and sent a man to jail?" Phillips asked. "Jesus, God almighty, you cannot do that. That is so wrong."

Parry, 29, lives in the small Camden County town of Brooklawn with his wife and child. Free on bail and awaiting sentencing in June, he answered the door yesterday in shorts and a T-shirt and declined comment.

His friends and relatives - including his father, Gloucester City Councilman Bruce Parry - also declined to speak on the record for this story.

Parry has deep roots in the working-class town of Gloucester City, next to Camden. Public records show that he grew up in a small one-story house on a dead-end street next to I-76, then a modest two-family structure down the block from a baseball field.

In his high school yearbook, Parry listed his "pet peeve" as "people who don't give other people a chance."

Stocky and muscular with a shaved head, he was a two-letter varsity athlete who, according to a baseball team photo caption, was adept at intimidating opposing pitchers with dirty looks.

Parry also was a member of the weightlifting club and included "lifting till 11:00" with a friend as one of his favorite school memories.

His parents took out a congratulatory advertisement in the yearbook, accompanied by a photo of Parry as a smiling toddler.

"Ever since you were little you have always amazed us with your many talents," it read. "Now as you graduate, remember to be the person you can be and Love, Happiness and Success will always prevail. Good luck in the future, whatever it may hold for you."

He spent the fall of 2000 at Camden County College, officials there said. He was a corrections officer at the Camden County Jail from May 2005 to March 2006, according to county records. Parry then entered the police academy and joined the department.

Parry and his alleged cohorts - identified by law enforcement sources as Officers Jason Stetser, Robert Bayard, and Antonio Figueroa, and Sgt. Dan Morris - are well-known on Camden's streets.

On recent visits to the city's Waterfront South section, where the officers operated, it was easy to find residents who have had drug cases dismissed or convictions vacated because of the probe.

From a photograph, a group of men hanging out at Viola and Fillmore identified Parry as one of the officers with a reputation for robbing and framing suspects.

They said Parry was known on the street as Baby Fat Face. Stetser was known as Fat Face, and another member of the group was called Cigar for the stogies he chomped on.

"He was a wannabe," one man said of Parry, summing up the group's statements.

They said that he "wasn't as angry" or "aggressive" as some of the other officers but that "he tried to do whatever they did."

Phillips described his former patrolman as "a big, quiet young boy."

"He wasn't boisterous. He wasn't demonstrative. He was a very quiet guy much within himself," Phillips recalled.

After the shooting in March 2007, in which Parry shot and killed an alleged gunman in response to a call of shots fired, Phillips asked Parry to take him to the scene and walk him through the shooting. Parry was hesitant, Phillips said, but he agreed.

"Nothing seemed irregular," Phillips said.

Police Chief Scott Thomson said that the policy was to put officers who kill in the line of duty on administrative leave. The officer sees a psychiatrist, who must attest to the officer's "mental fitness for duty."

Parry returned to duty, but the incident "weighed on him," Phillips said.

He and the other suspected officers were "great producers" who seized extraordinary quantities of guns and drugs, Phillips said.

The officers turned down plum assignments to stay on the streets, Phillips said, and kept their own arrest statistics that they provided to their superiors.

Explaining how they made so many busts, they said they used binoculars to stake out drug corners from cars and abandoned houses, Phillips said.

In February 2008, for example, Parry and Stetser were involved in capturing 1,274 bags of drugs and $11,495 in cash, according to one report. Phillips said the numbers were jaw-dropping.

But convictions stemming from that month's arrests have now been vacated. One man arrested, Obie Carmichael, taken into custody with 61 bags of drugs, was released Jan. 12.

Phillips said that nothing about their police work or reports caused him to doubt the officers.

"Part of this rests on my shoulders," he said. "Somewhere along the line my supervisors and I failed dramatically to pick this up. . . . Our system has failed."

This is the worst scandal the department has faced in four decades, Phillips said.

"This is going to reverberate for years in the city," he said. "It certainly isn't something that's going to build trust."

By the end of 2008, authorities apparently had suspicions about Parry. He and Stetser were called to a scene where fake drugs were stashed, and a surveillance camera recorded their movements, according to police memos.

Yet Parry continued to work - and to make what he now acknowledges were bogus arrests - for another year.

After he was suspended from the force in November, Parry applied for state disability benefits for an unspecified injury related to the 2007 shooting.

"People make mistakes," said John Williamson, president of Parry's former police union. "I'm going to keep Officer Parry and his family in my prayers."