Rasmussen also was contacted by Phoenix investigators, who wrote in their report that she was "reluctant" to consent to an interview, worried that whatever she said would be "misrepresented" and "blown out of proportion" in the media.
However, she backed up Hegarty's story that he'd "reimbursed" her for the tickets and that the seats weren't owned by the ATA but by an ATA member. Despite what she'd said in the e-mail, Rasmussen maintained, the DPS officials were not "guests."
Above: The shot of Jack Hegarty (left) and Tim Mason at a D-backs game that sparked the investigation. Behind Hegarty is Karen Rasmussen of the Arizona Trucking Association. Below: Hegarty's check for the tickets wasn't cashed until after he was told he'd be investigated.
Robert Halliday, director of the Arizona Department of Public Safety.
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It stands to reason that her e-mail is more believable than her statements to the investigator, because she hadn't known there would be any trouble when she sent it.
In the "brief" phone conversation with Pagone, Rasmussen said she didn't remember providing any free tickets to DPS employees in 2008 or 2009. New Times called her for comment, but she didn't call back.
As with those of others involved, some of Director Halliday's answers to Phoenix officers don't ring true. He appears to have been treated with special consideration by the PPD. His interview fits on one page of the 204-page report, and there is no evidence in the report that his comments were challenged.
Halliday remembered going to only two Diamondbacks games with Rasmussen, with Hegarty also attending. The first was in 2009, during the break in his service between retiring and becoming director. As a private citizen at the time, it didn't matter whether he was gifted the ticket.
The second time he went was after becoming director, either in the "early 2010" or "early 2011" season, he said. Either way, Halliday says he was "under the impression" that Hegarty had purchased the tickets from Rasmussen.
He said he didn't believe he violated any policy.
Taking Halliday at his word that he attended only the one game as director, it still doesn't fit that he would assume Hegarty had bought the tickets from Rasmussen without at least asking Hegarty to verify that assumption. After all, Halliday should have known that if he had guessed wrong and the ATA had paid for the tickets, he could get disciplined for a policy violation.
On January 5, Hegarty, in his final written response to the allegations against him, implied that Halliday went to more than just that one game with the ATA as director. He says it can't be true that Halliday believed Hegarty had bought or owned the tickets.
"This is not truthful, he clearly understood the tickets were owned by Karen Rasmussen, and on at least one occasion, physically accepted the ticket from Karen outside the stadium," Hegarty wrote.
Hegarty cried that his old friend also lied about the circumstances of Hegarty's demotion.
Halliday was quoted in the Arizona Republic after the October 2011 demotion as saying that the FOP survey was just one factor in Hegarty's demotion — and that "there were some other people outside the agency that were pretty unhappy with him in state government."
Halliday didn't elaborate, but it seems clear that the baseball-game incident had something to do with the demotion, based on the timing. Halliday denies that, though.
Hegarty, meanwhile, claims that Halliday told him on October 28 that the "sole reason" for his demotion was his attendance at the baseball game. After his meeting that day with Halliday, Hegarty says, the director called "several department employees and non-employees," telling them Hegarty was the subject of a criminal investigation and that was the reason for the demotion.
It's a he said/he said story — except not a typical one in that both "hes" were among the highest-ranking cops in the state.
In January 2011, Highway Patrol chief Jack Hegarty prepared a draft report assessing the effectiveness of the February 2010 order prohibiting state troopers (except the fraction that work in the commercial-vehicle bureau) from making random stops and inspections of commercial vehicles. No final version ever was completed.
Hegarty related in the report the concern of some officers that they were losing an enforcement "tool" because of the order, and he mentioned a February 2010 article in the Republic critical of the policy change. But he added that the change was "relatively insignificant."
Using 11 months of data, from February to December 2010, Hegarty wrote that overall inspections had increased since the change for various reasons but that slightly fewer inspected trucks had been taken out of service because of problems. The drop was "unexpected," according to Hegarty, but the DPS' rate of taking unsafe trucks off the road was still higher than the national average.
While inspections were up, fatal crashes involving commercial vehicles in 2010 went down, Hegarty wrote. He quickly added that other factors could be involved besides the increase in inspections. But the crashes result clearly was what he was hoping for, and he concluded that the new policy prohibiting random stops "did not negatively impact" inspections or the percentage of trucks ordered out of service by the DPS. He made another reference to the fact that "fatal crashes" decreased during the new policy period.
But a different picture emerges when looking at injury and property-damage crashes in 2010, and at all three categories of crashes in 2011.
It turns out that crashes actually were up.
