A federal court has thrown out the claims of two ex-Rangely police officers who alleged the Rio Blanco County sheriff violated their rights by providing false information about them during an administrative investigation.

That inquiry followed the fatal shooting of 58-year-old Daniel Pierce, who had stolen a truck and was known to be mentally ill. Pierce suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and his killing was the subject of a 2019 report from The Colorado Independent and The Rio Blanco Herald Times.

U.S. District Court Senior Judge R. Brooke Jackson dismissed the lawsuit against Sheriff Anthony Mazzola by former officers Vincent Wilczek and Roy Kinney on Oct. 8. Jackson noted the plaintiffs had made a series of procedural errors and that some of their legal claims were clearly nonsensical.

To the extent that Mazzola violated Wilczek and Kinney’s right to equal protection under the law by providing information to investigators, “the allegations provide no clue as to how the Sheriff treated them differently than other similarly situated individuals. No one else was under investigation,” the judge observed.

According to The Independent and The Herald Times’ reporting, Kinney shot Pierce twice in the head on Dec. 10, 2018 after Pierce led law enforcement on a vehicle chase into Rangely. Kinney thought Pierce had fired a gun, but it was actually Wilczek, the town’s police chief, who had.

The reporting revealed not only Mazzola’s conflicts with the local police department, but that Rangely officials had tried to deter The Herald Times from publishing the story.

According to the lawsuit, an investigation of Pierce’s killing resulted in no criminal charges against Wilczek and Kinney, but a second inquiry focused on whether the men followed departmental procedures. It was in this investigation that the officers alleged Mazzola had “provided false character information about Plaintiffs.” 

Mazzola reportedly told the investigators that Kinney “was involved in an officer involved shooting, which was not true,” and that Wilczek as chief “refused … to have the officer involved shooting investigated, which is also not true.”

The Independent and The Herald Times reported that Kinney in 2016 fired two shots into the air with civilians and a sheriff’s deputy nearby. Mazzola considered the conduct reckless and worried about future liability. Both officers said they were forced to resign on May 1, 2019.

Jackson concluded that Wilczek and Kinney had failed to plausibly claim Mazzola deprived them of any legal rights by speaking to investigators. “It is not the Court’s role to try to construct a viable claim for them,” the judge added.

However, Jackson did allow the ex-officers to revise and refile their claims if they so chose.

The case is Wilczek et al. v. Rio Blanco County et al.