Oregon police failed to punish off-duty officer vandalizing Black Lives Matter flag: report

An Oregon police officer is facing a charge of official misconduct after responding to a report of vandalism at a home with a Black Lives Matter sign and allegedly driving the suspect — a fellow officer — home instead of arresting him.

Bradley Schuetz, an officer with the Forest Grove Police Department, was indicted Thursday by a grand jury on one count of first-degree official misconduct following an outside investigation from a neighboring police department, according to a statement.

His arrest stems from an incident that occurred in the early hours of Halloween last year.

Mirella Castaneda told investigators that she was woken up just after midnight to her car alarm going off and a loud banging sound.

She reportedly discovered a man standing in her driveway, hitting his fists against the Black Lives Matter flag hanging on her metal garage door. The man appeared to have set off the alarm on the family’s pickup truck, which also had “Black Lives Matter” painted on the window. 

The stranger allegedly kicked the front door and shouted at the family inside the home. 

“I’ve never been so frightened, never had someone attack, come at us,” Castaneda, who is Latina, told KGW8 after the incident. 

The man eventually ran off and the family called the police.  

Schuetz and another officer, Amber Daniels, arrived on the scene approximately 15 minutes later and discovered the suspect walking nearby was an off-duty officer named Steven Teets.

Teets was reportedly so “highly intoxicated” that he “squared up” in a fighting stance, fists clenched, and did not recognize Schuetz and Daniels, according to a Washington County Sheriff’s Office memo obtained by The Portland Tribune.

Instead of arresting Teets, Schuetz drove him the two blocks home and reportedly assisted Teets in getting to his front door and unlocking it.

The officers who interviewed Castaneda did not tell her that they had identified Teets, nor did they divulge that they had already taken him home. 

“We’ll let you know if we hear anything,” Castaneda recalled one of the officers telling her.

Deputies with the Washington County Sheriff’s Office investigated the incident and arrested Teets on charges of criminal mischief and disorderly conduct.

It reportedly took roughly three days for officials to disclose Teets’s arrest to Castaneda. She alleges that investigators violated department policy and Oregon law by failing to tell her that the attacker lived nearby, was a police officer or carried a firearm as part of his job.

She says she only learned that he was an employee of the Forest Grove Police Department after looking him up on the internet. 

Michael Fuller, Castaneda’s attorney, provided The Washington Post with a tort claim, declaring their intent to sue the Forest Grove Police Department. The claim accuses police of working “in concert, either intentionally, or subconsciously due to implicit bias, to deprive Ms. Castaneda of her Constitutional rights” amid the investigation.

Fuller alleges that the police did not document the possible political motives that could be involved with the attack on Castaneda’s home. The responding officers did not note the existence of the Black Lives Matter flags, nor did they turn on their body cameras as mandated by police policy.

“The treatment of Ms. Castaneda as a second-class citizen based on her political viewpoint by the investigating officers added insult to injury, and further compounded the emotional trauma she and her family had experienced at the hands of Officer Teets,” her lawyer told the Post.

Forest Grove Police Chief Henry Reimann asked the nearby Beaverton Police Department to conduct an outside investigation into the incident, which led to Schuetz’s charges. Daniels, the other on-duty officer at the scene, was not charged.