BOSTON, Feb. 12, 2016—Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley has designated Assistant District Attorney John Verner to lead his office’s independent investigation into today’s use of lethal force by a Boston Police officer responding to a call for a person shot.

“Our priority is to conduct a full, fair, thorough investigation,” Conley said. “When it’s complete, we will release all our findings and the complete investigative file in the interests of total transparency. For now, we’re giving the investigators the time and the tools they need to do the job right.”

Verner, whose formal title is Supervisor of Special Homicide Investigations, responded to the area of Devon, Laredo, and Stanwood streets this morning and will conduct both a fact-finding review of the incident and comprehensive legal analysis. As with any such investigation in Boston, Chelsea, Revere, or Winthrop, it will be exhaustively documented with the expectation that all interviews, photographs, reports, and other records will be released to the family of the deceased as well as Boston’s media upon completion – a policy of transparency unparalleled elsewhere in the country.

Before he was sworn in as a Suffolk prosecutor earlier this year, Verner served as chief of the Public Protection, Anti-Terrorism, Corruption, and Technology Unit of the Middlesex District Attorney’s office, overseeing the team that prosecuted public corruption, police misconduct, organized crime, white collar crime, and large scale narcotics offenses. More recently, he served as chief and chief trial counsel of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Criminal Bureau, which investigates and prosecutes organized crime, financial fraud, human trafficking, public corruption, and other offenses.

–30–

All defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.