Massachusetts State Police Superintendent Involved in Altered Arrest Report Retires
Col. Richard McKeon announced he was leaving the force in the midst of controversy.
Photo via iStock.com/Kali9
Col. Richard McKeon, who has served as superintendent of the Massachusetts State Police since 2015, is retiring, the Boston Globe reports.
The announcement comes the same week he was accused of ordering an officer to censor humiliating details from the arrest report of a judge’s daughter. In an email to the state troopers, McKeon wrote that, “putting the greater good of the Massachusetts state police first necessitates my decision to retire after 35 years of proud service,” according to the Globe.
McKeon previously admitted that he told trooper Ryan Sceviour to edit the documents related to Alli Bibaud, whose father Timothy Bibaud presides over the drug court in Dudley. Alli Bibaud was arrested in mid-October for driving under the influence, and Sceviour found drug paraphernalia in her car at the scene of the accident. Friday, a second trooper, Ali Rei, came forward to say that she, too, was instructed to tamper with documents related to Bibaud’s case, though she was not instructed to do so by McKeon.
Sceviour filed a lawsuit against McKeon in response, and Gov. Charlie Baker announced he would launch an investigation into the case on Thursday.
In his resignation letter, submitted to Secretary Daniel Bennett, who leads the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, McKeon doubled-down on his statement that asking troopers to remove erroneous information from arrest reports was not out of the ordinary; in fact, McKeon wrote, “this case is not unlike the thousands of cases we are involved in every year involving drug addiction.”
McKeon went on to contextualize Bibaud’s case within the broader opioid epidemic plaguing the Commonwealth and the nation at large. You can read the entirety of the letter here:
Read the letter from the State Police chief retiring amid controversy over an altered arrest report: https://t.co/8QzUOlUKLQ pic.twitter.com/XWrsQNSbzd
— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) November 10, 2017
