A love affair between two Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers reached a violent climax last month after one of the officers took another lover. In a jealous rage, Officer Gina Cook stormed Officer Rebecca Serena Garber’s Shadow Oaks Drive apartment on January 10, looking for a way in. Garber, Cook’s ex-girlfriend, was asleep in a back bedroom with another woman when Cook, 38, began frantically calling her from a cell phone and banging on the apartment door. Garber, 32, told Cook to leave, but it did no good. Cook pummeled Garber’s windows with rocks, then kicked in the door to Garber’s apartment.
According to an internal police report obtained by Creative Loafing, Cook first went after Lisa Marie Compton, 30, who had been asleep in the back bedroom with Garber. When Garber stepped between the two women, Cook repeatedly spit on her, then shoved her in a closet. Cook punched Compton, who does not work for the police department, in the face.
Cook also punched Garber, who eventually freed herself from the closet, in the face and head several times before throwing her on the bed and strangling her until she couldn’t breathe.
“I know she can’t breathe,” Cook growled at Compton when Compton pointed out to her that the other officer was struggling for air, according to the report. Cook, a K-9 officer with 12 years on the force, eventually fled the scene in her K-9 unit patrol vehicle.
According to confidential police reports, officers who responded to the call for help from Garber’s apartment called Sergeant O.D. Holshouser from the police internal affairs department when they realized that two police officers were involved in the domestic assault. Holshouser and another officer later drove to Cook’s home in Huntersville to look for her while Garber and Compton were shuffled through interviews with internal affairs, then the department’s domestic violence unit.
How Cook was apprehended, and by whom, remains a mystery. Cook was later charged with breaking and entering, two counts of assault, and communicating threats. She’s now on administrative duty pending the conclusion of both internal and criminal investigations.
The situation is a humdinger for the police department on several levels. Cook is one of four officers the internal affairs department is currently investigating for domestic assaults against partners or family members. While the officers who arrived at Garber’s apartment after the alleged assault discreetly filled in “unknown” in the relationship-to-suspect category of the internal report leaked to CL, and the department withheld the nature of the women’s’ relationship in other publicly released reports available to the media, other officers involved in the incident apparently didn’t get the hush-hush memo. In their internal incident narratives, which CL also obtained copies of, they refer to Cook as Garber’s “ex-girlfriend.”
Though the romantic relationship between Cook and Garber didn’t violate department policy since the two women worked in different areas, inside sources say the nature of their relationship, which was well-known among many within the force, was a potential source of embarrassment to the police department because under North Carolina law, homosexual acts are illegal, although laws against such acts are very rarely enforced.
The situation also raises questions about how domestic abuse situations involving officers are handled within the force, particularly within the secretive internal affairs department. The problem is that short of using stealth to obtain an internal report you’re not supposed to have, there’s no way to know how these situations are really handled, or whether officers and their alleged victims are given a fair shake. *
This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2002.
