Re: Someone urinated in a female sergeant's boots. Now the California Air National Guard faces coverup allegations

[Lock The FAGGOTS UP Like We Did The Japanese!]

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<governo...@gmail.com> wrote:
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> Only believe CNN!

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For Staff Sgt. Jennifer Pineda, a 15-year veteran of the
California Air National Guard, the military was a family
calling. She followed her older sister and brother-in-law into
the guard, where she now holds an administrative position at the
elite 144th Fighter Wing in Fresno.

On a March morning four years ago, Pineda was about to dress
into a uniform she had stored overnight in a stall in the
women’s bathroom when she made a foul discovery.

Someone had urinated in her boots.

The incident left Pineda humiliated and frightened and would
trigger a series of behind-the-scenes investigations whose scope
has come to extend beyond what happened that day at the Fresno
base.

The defiling of Pineda’s boots has led to allegations that high-
ranking officers tried to bury the incident, including by
destroying evidence that could have potentially identified a
suspect through DNA, and retaliated against a male pilot who
supported her efforts to find the perpetrator, according to
interviews and guard records obtained by The Times. Some in the
wing have begun calling the ongoing saga “Pissgate.”

After The Times began asking questions about the Pineda episode,
the California Military Department, which oversees the guard,
asked the U.S. Air Force Inspector General’s Office to conduct
an investigation.

In the backdrop of the #MeToo movement, guard leaders are
concerned about the degrading nature of the act aimed at a
woman, according to two sources close to the investigation, who
requested anonymity because they are not authorized to publicly
speak about the matter. Only about 20% of the officers and
enlisted members in the guard are women.

The inspector general’s inquiry is the third investigation into
the Pineda affair and part of a broader probe into whether
whistle-blowers at the 144th wing suffered reprisals for
questioning the actions or conduct of their superiors on a range
of matters. At least five guard members from the 144th wing,
including a pilot who was killed in October in a crash during a
training mission in Ukraine, filed formal complaints. The guard
recently suspended a 144th commander for reasons it said were
unrelated to the Pineda incident.

“This boils down to just unprofessional leadership and
cronyism,” said Maj. Dan Woodside, a retired 144th fighter pilot
who is a witness in the inspector general’s Pineda investigation
and has complained about how she was treated. “If anybody had
urinated in their boots, they would have done everything they
could to find the perpetrator, even if it involved calling the
FBI.”

Two of the guard’s top officers held key leadership positions at
the 144th at the time of the Pineda incident: Maj. Gen. Clay
Garrison, who has since become head of the air guard, and Col.
Sean Navin, now one of its five wing commanders. Neither
responded to requests for interviews.

Maj. Gen. David S. Baldwin, who heads the Military Department,
declined through a guard spokesman to be interviewed. Baldwin
said in a written statement to The Times that “in order to
protect the integrity of that ongoing investigation, we cannot
disclose additional details.”

The California air guard is the second largest, after New
York’s, in the Air National Guard, which is a force of more than
100,000 pilots, other officers and enlisted people. Many of the
pilots are part-time reservists, signing up after careers in the
U.S. Air Force, and some fly in their civilian lives for
commercial airlines.

The guards function as state militias whose leaders report to
the governor. They patrol state airspace and stand ready to
respond to natural disasters and large-scale terrorist attacks.

In California, the air guard helped fight recent wildfires,
flying drones over the blazes to feed intelligence to fire crews
on the ground. Its fighter pilots are regularly deployed to
assist the Air Force in combat and other operations overseas.

The 144th is the biggest wing in the state. It is home to
roughly 115 officers, including about two dozen fighter pilots,
and more than 1,000 enlistees in support units. For every
officer in the wing, there are about nine enlistees in roles
that are essential but carry much less clout.

Pineda, 34, is one of them.

After joining the guard in 2004, she spent several years in the
wing’s command post as a dispatcher before moving to the
operations group, according to interviews with guard colleagues.
Pineda declined to comment for this story.

Soon after she reported that someone had urinated on her boots,
members of the 144th’s security forces, who police the base,
arrived at the location, attempted to lift fingerprints and had
photos taken of the scene, according to an internal
investigative record obtained by The Times. The security airmen
collected the urine from the floor and reviewed hours of
security camera footage, the document states.

Investigative records describe the incident as “vandalism.” If
committed by someone with a rank of second lieutenant or higher,
legal experts said, the act could also be considered the more
serious crime of conduct unbecoming an officer. The perpetrator,
they said, could be prosecuted and jailed in a court martial,
forced to retire in an administrative proceeding at a reduced
rank and pension, or handed a lesser punishment such as a
reprimand.

The investigators asked Pineda, then a single mother of two, who
she thought could have had a motive to target her, according to
the report. Pineda named two women who “have had issues with”
her in the past, and her supervisor later suggested one more,
the report says. It states that all three women were questioned.

The results of the investigation were inconclusive, the report
says.

About two months after the investigation began, the commander of
the fighter squadron at the time, Navin, called Pineda and her
supervisor into his office to share the results, according to
May 2015 memos that Pineda and the supervisor wrote to document
the conversation.

Navin apologized that the investigation did not find the
perpetrator, according to the memos. In Pineda’s memo, she wrote
that Navin said killings go unsolved every day and these things
just happen.

“I started to ask him how I was supposed to come to work and
feel OK in a work environment where I have been violated like
this,” Pineda said in her memo.

Pineda said in the document that she had begun securing her
uniform in a locker, parks where she can see her car from her
work desk window and keeps the desk locked up each night.

Soon after the first investigation was shelved, a second was
opened when “new information” revealed that pilots had been
drinking in a nearby break room the evening before the discovery
and “may have information regarding the incident or may have
possibly been involved in the incident,” according to a guard
report and interviews. Navin, the commander who had shared the
results of the first investigation with Pineda, had been in the
break room as well that evening, the report says.

Investigators questioned 18 people, including Navin, Woodside
and four other guard members who said they had been in the break
room, called “The Merge.”

The two investigators told at least some of the pilots that they
might be asked to undergo polygraph tests and that the urine
collected from the scene would be tested for DNA, Woodside said.
Some were also questioned about how much Navin had to drink, he
added.

In a second interview with investigators, Pineda said a couple
of pilots told her they suspected Navin of urinating on her
boots, the report says. She said she felt that Navin “doesn’t
trust her work abilities,” according to the report.

Navin denied being involved, guard records show. He told
investigators that he had no conflicts with Pineda and was never
inside the women’s bathroom where she left her boots and
clothing.

The investigator who authored the report wrote that the
interviews “did not lead to any new conclusions” or identify any
suspects.

In August 2015, Pineda filed a whistle-blower complaint. She
wrote that the main investigator told her that the evidence
showed that a woman could not have urinated in the boots, but
that she heard that officers speculated that she urinated in
them “for attention.” In the complaint, Pineda said that “makes
me want this investigation to be complete and legit to prove
that I did not do this to myself.” She added that she feared she
could be forced to leave the guard.

The guard declined to comment about the status of Pineda's
complaint.

Last year, Lt. Col. Rob Swertfager, a 144th pilot, filed a
complaint alleging that commanders punished him — including by
withholding his pay on occasion — for going to bat for Pineda by
telling a superior that the first investigation might have been
mishandled. His complaint is part of the inspector general’s
investigation. He declined to comment for this story.

Woodside said the head of base security, then-Lt. Col. Dave
Johnston, told him that 144th ”leadership” ordered him to shut
down the investigation and destroy all the evidence after
investigators zeroed in on Navin. The evidence included Pineda’s
boots and a vial of urine that was never tested.

Woodside said he believes “there was a cover-up.”

Johnston, since promoted to colonel, did not say who gave him
the order, Woodside said. He said Johnston informed him about
the destruction of the evidence during a 32-minute telephone
conversation on Dec. 7, 2017. He produced phone records that
showed such a call to Johnston’s number.

In interviews with The Times, four current and former guard
members confirmed that Woodside told them about his phone
conversation with Johnston shortly after it occurred.

Johnston declined to be interviewed. He said in two statements
provided to The Times that no one ordered him to dispose of the
evidence. Johnston said he had consulted with Garrison, who ran
the base at the time of the incident, about destroying the
evidence. Garrison’s only guidance, Johnston wrote, was that he
first confer with the 144th’s judge advocate general at the
time, who did not respond to interview requests.

Johnston said he authorized the destruction because the second
investigation had been closed for several months and the
evidence was no longer needed. He declined to discuss why a DNA
test was never conducted.

The lead investigator, Daniel Mosqueda, offered no explanation
for not testing the urine.

“The way the investigation went, it didn’t happen,” he told The
Times.

Woodside said he confronted Garrison about the investigation at
a colonel’s retirement party in March 2017, after the evidence
had been destroyed. He said Garrison told him that there was “no
actual crime here” and that it would have been inappropriate to
spend “thousands of dollars” on a urine test that wouldn’t
produce usable information.

Depending on the condition of the specimen, a DNA analysis of
the urine could have determined the perpetrator’s sex and
perhaps identified him or her definitively through a comparison
test, forensic experts told The Times. Typically, it would cost
about $1,000 to $1,300, they said.

Experts on military and criminal law questioned the decision to
destroy evidence without conducting a DNA analysis. Southwestern
Law School Professor Rachel E. VanLandingham, who served as a
prosecutor and criminal defense attorney during a U.S. Air Force
career, said if evidence was destroyed to impede an
investigation or protect someone, a case could be made for
obstruction of justice.

“That needs to be looked into,” she said.

About a year after the incident, Navin was promoted to colonel
and is now commander of the 163rd Attack Wing in Riverside
County, overseeing more than 900 people and the deployment of
the MQ-9A Reaper military drone.

A guard spokesman declined to say what prompted the recent
suspension of the 144th commander, Col. Victor Sikora. Shortly
after the suspension, Sikora called a meeting of pilots and
support personnel at the Fresno base. He told the gathering that
he had been informed he was suspended “due to the amount of
investigations” the guard leadership was dealing with, according
to a recording of the meeting The Times reviewed. He did not
elaborate.

Sikora did not respond to requests for comment about the
suspension.

Among the other complaints under investigation by the inspector
general is one filed by Lt. Col. Seth Nehring shortly before he
was killed in October in a crash during a training mission in
Ukraine. No details of his complaint were available. The
investigator leading the inspector general’s probe, Lt. Col.
Shawna Pavey, did not respond to interview requests.

Dave Bakos, a retired general who served in the guard for 32
years and was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, said Garrison
should have demanded a more thorough investigation from the
start. Morale at the 144th has suffered, Bakos said.

“There are a lot of people unhappy up there,” he said. “They
need a change at the top.”

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-california-air-
national-guard-urination-20190210-story.html