A Vilonia man helping to deliver newspapers on the night of Nov. 25 claims that the off-duty acting Mayflower Police Chief acted inappropriately in approaching him with a drawn handgun.
Micky Paul Grissom, 30, said on Monday that he was helping his wife deliver the Log Cabin Democrat to homes on Green Meadows Road a few miles south of Vilonia when he used a residential driveway to turn around and, at about 10:30 p.m., stopped in a section of road about 200 yards away to move newspapers from the bed of the pickup truck into the cab.
“I stopped to get out of the truck (and) threw my papers from the back of the truck to the front,” Grissom said. “Next thing I know there’s a car flying up on me and I see that there’s little blue lights in the grill and a guy gets out and yells, ‘What are you doing?’ I tell him I’m delivering papers ... and I turn back and look and he’s got his gun drawn on me, and he’s telling me to get back around the back of the truck. He got up to me and he saw the papers and he said, ‘Man, you can’t be stopping in front of people’s houses without telling them what’s going on.”
Grissom filed a police report to this effect Tuesday with the Vilonia Police Department. In his written statement to Vilonia police, Grissom stated, “That was the first time I feared for my life, and it was because of an off-duty officer.”
Acting Mayflower Chief of Police Sgt. Robert Alcon released a written statement on Tuesday in response, claiming that he observed the vehicle in his driveway for about 25 to 30 seconds before the truck pulled out and proceeded east on Hwy. 107, stopping in the road near an adjacent residence.
“I went and put on some jeans and boots and got my pistol from its holster,” Alcon stated in this release. “The truck was still there when I went outside to get in my patrol car. As I pulled out from my driveway the truck pulled out and started to go east. This made me have even more reasonable suspicion that there may be some criminal activity going on. My probable cause to make the traffic stop was (that the) vehicle was stopped in the roadway, blocking it for more than 10 minutes. I turned on my blue lights and made the stop approximately 50 yards from where the truck was parked.
“The driver ... stepped from the truck and I had advised him to show me his hands. I had my flashlight in my left hand and my pistol in my right hand. I did raise my pistol at about a 45-degree angle. Once he showed me his hands I dropped the pistol back to my side and put it in the small of my back. I recognized the driver as someone I know from Vilonia, and apparently he knew me, because he called me by name Alcon. I asked him what he was doing, and he told me he was the paper carrier, and I advised OK that it was the Christmas season and there are a lot of break ins at this time of year. We shook hands, and I advised him to have a good night, he said for me to do the same.”
Grissom said on Tuesday that he was “looking at the barrel, and I could see a light right beside it and I saw barrel pointed at me.
“That’s the whole deal of a gun being pointed at me, I don’t like that,” he said. “Whether it was pointed at me or not, it’s like I told them at Vilonia, when we fear our protectors, what are we supposed to do?” He said again that he feared for his life during the incident, and thought that any loud noise might have caused Alcon to shoot him. He said that he “would go check if somebody was messing around my neighborhood, but I wouldn’t come out with my gun.”
Alcon maintained that he held his handgun at a 45-degree muzzle-down angle when he made contact with Grissom and put the weapon away once he saw the man’s hands.
“I had the gun at about a 45 (degree angle) just to see if he was armed, and even if I had the gun pointed at him it would have been normal procedure,” Alcon said. “It’s a dangerous job we do. I like going home at night. I don’t know what he expects us to do. I’m a police officer. I’m not just Joe public trying to see what’s going on. ... Was I supposed to walk up there with my hands empty?”
“I am a police officer that has a right to protect myself ... I was trying to protect my neighbors,” he said.
Alcon is deputized by Faulkner County Sheriff Karl Byrd, and Byrd said that his jurisdiction is countywide.
Byrd said that he didn’t want to comment on the issue because he didn’t know the exact circumstances, but said that, in general, “Any officer, off-duty or not, I would be extremely disappointed if something suspicious was going on in his neighborhood and he didn’t investigate it — take some initiative to look into some suspicious circumstances going on in his neighborhood.”
Vilonia Chief of Police Brad McNew said that he would turn the incident over to the 20th Judicial Prosecuting Attorney’s office for review.
