Officer Tied to Shooting Investigation

The Bristol Virginia police officer who shot a man May 16 while responding to a domestic call is intimately tied to the office that normally would determine whether to charge him criminally.

Gary Wilcox, a veteran lawman who joined the Bristol force less than a year ago, is married to an assistant prosecutor in the Bristol Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office.

The investigation into the shooting that critically wounded John Kelly Gramling is being handled by the Virginia State Police, which will report its findings to Bristol Commonwealth’s Attorney Jerry Wolfe.

On Friday, Wolfe said he would remove his office from the case and outsource it to a special prosecutor – partly because of Wilcox’s marital ties and partly because his office works with Wilcox on a regular basis.

“We would do that for any officer,” Wolfe said.

That was news to a Virginia State Police spokesman, who said the agency would communicate its findings to Wolfe and knew nothing of plans to appoint a special prosecutor. Wolfe said he is waiting until he receives the report from the State Police to reach out to a substitute prosecutor, he said.

“I have one in mind, but I have not contacted him yet,” Wolfe said. He would not name the attorney.

No details on what precipitated the shooting have emerged ahead of the State Police report, which is slated to be released later this week.

In the account released by Bristol Virginia Police, Wilcox responded early May 16 to a report of an intoxicated man causing a disturbance at an apartment complex on Knoll Drive, where Gramling lived.

Gramling, 50, approached Wilcox and did not respond to the officer’s instruction to show his hands, according to the police statement. Gramling then pulled a handgun from behind his back and pointed it at Wilcox. That’s when the officer fired, striking him three times.

Kim Harmon, who lives adjacent to Gramling’s unit, was awake and working on her résumé after 3 a.m. when she heard the shots, followed by an officer’s cry of “shots fired!” It is not clear whether any residents of the apartment complex witnessed the confrontation.

Wilcox, who has been placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the Virginia State Police investigation, has been in law enforcement since at least 1998, including five years as a state trooper alternately assigned to the city of Salem and to Rockbridge, Culpeper and Warren counties. He came to the Bristol department from the Watauga County (N.C.) Sheriff’s Office in June, according to interviews with state and local law enforcement officers.

While a deputy in North Carolina, Wilcox commuted to Boone from Abingdon, where he lives with his wife, Colette, an assistant commonwealth’s attorney in Bristol, his former employer said.

“His performance was fine; there were no issues there,” Watauga County Sheriff Len Hagaman said in a phone interview. A Virginia State Police spokeswoman declined to release any information about Wilcox’s record there.

Wilcox left Watauga for “an exciting and challenging new opportunity” in Bristol, said Hagaman, reading from Wilcox’s June 27, 2008, resignation letter.

Wilcox, it turns out, is one of two Bristol law enforcement couples whose romantic ties connect the Police Department and the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office.

Officer Claude Mumpower is engaged to assistant prosecutor Kimberly Ann Loucks – meaning half of the city’s prosecutors soon will be hitched to police officers.

Wolfe said these ties do not complicate his office’s work. While he does not think his assistants have a conflict of interest in prosecuting a case in which their husband or fiancé could be a witness, Wolfe said he removes them from those cases to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

In the case of the May 16 shooting, Wolfe said, his office has remained aloof from the investigation.

“We prosecute, we don’t investigate,” he said.

With Gramling in critical but stable condition, his family members are anxiously awaiting a fuller version of the confrontation that left him riddled with bullets, and facing charges of assaulting a police officer, possessing a concealed weapon, brandishing a firearm and use of a firearm in commission of a felony.
“We don’t know exactly what happened,” said Gramling’s 22-year-old daughter, Kelly.

The charges represent a serious deviation from Gramling’s prior run-ins with the law. His name surfaces in court records in Georgia, Virginia and Tennessee as far back as 1977 and as recently as 2007, but reveal no felony charges or convictions.

He pleaded guilty in September 2007 to assaulting a co-worker at the Acme Hotdog Restaurant in Bristol, Tenn., and was given a suspended sentence, ordered to attend counseling and perform community service, and placed on probation.

His probation officer in August filed a motion claiming Gramling had not complied with his terms, but the court record does not indicate that he was ever served with a warrant or had any of his suspended sentence revoked.

Kelly Gramling, who lives in Georgia, saw her father two days before his latest clash with police. In a telephone interview, she said her father seemed happy and that his demeanor offered no clues of a storm on the horizon.

“He doesn’t have a gun that we know of,” and never has, she said. “Nobody in my family has.”

Gramling does have what his daughter described as an attitude – “he lets you know how he feels about things” – which another neighbor described as a mean streak when drinking.

Two women, neighbors of Gramling, independently said he was kind and good with their daughters.

“Why did it happen? It makes no sense,” Kelly Gramling said.

“Our family is sorry for what happened to the officer. It’s not an easy thing for anyone to go through,” she said. “I don’t know. It’s just sad all around. ’Nuff said.”

Staff writer Mac McLean contributed to this report.

dgilbert@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2558