St. Louis police chief Dan Isom is apologizing for a leaked photo from a south St. Louis crime scene that shows the body of 35-year-old Carlos Boles.
"It's completely inappropriate for that to have occurred," Isom said after today's meeting of the Board of Police Commissioners. "And we apologize certainly in advance if it's anything that our officers have done. As soon as we learned about it, we started an internal investigation."
It's department policy that photos of crime scenes are taken only for investigative purposes, Isom says.
"I'm very confident that it wasn't a forensic photo that was taken by our evidence technician unit," he says. "Clearly it was probably someone who had photo capacity on their phone who took it and forwarded it to someone else."
The U.S. Marshals Service says it will cooperate in any investigation into the source of the photo. Though the Federal Bureau of Investigation took over the crime scene, a spokeswoman says the Bureau believes the photo was taken before that happened:
"Once the FBI took control of the crime scene, NO ONE was allowed inside the house without wearing protective gear (white suit and booties). The picture shows someone in the background not wearing protective gear. Because we are confident it was not an FBI personnel who took the picture, there will be no internal investigation."
Boles was shot and killed the morning of March 8 after he fired at two U.S. Marshals and a St. Louis police officer who had come to execute an arrest warrant. One of the marshals, John Perry, later died of his injuries.
