An officer with the San Antonio, Texas, police department is on “indefinite suspension” after his colleagues accused him of giving a homeless man two pieces of bread filled with feces.
The San Antonio Express-News, which first reported the story Friday, referred to the item as a “fecal sandwich.” San Antonio Police Department spokeswoman Romana Lopez provided the disturbing details to The Huffington Post in a statement.
Officer Matthew Luckhurst, who had been on the force for five years, bragged to a fellow officer in May that he “picked up some feces, placed it in a slice of bread, and put it in a Styrofoam container next to the unknown homeless male,” the statement says.
The second officer said he told Luckhurst to go back and throw it away. He said he saw Luckhurst return to the scene and assumed the contents of the container were thrown away, although he didn’t know for sure.
In July, another officer reported the incident to Luckhurst’s supervisor. After an investigation, two review boards recommended that Luckhurst be suspended indefinitely ― which essentially means fired ― and police Chief William McManus opted to uphold that recommendation last week. The San Antonio City Council received a briefing on the situation Thursday.
“This was a vile and disgusting act that violates our guiding principles of ‘treating all with integrity, compassion, fairness and respect,’” said Chief McManus in the department’s statement. “The fact that his fellow officers were so disgusted with his actions that they reported him to Internal Affairs demonstrates that this type of behavior will never be tolerated.”
Luckhurst’s lawyer, Ben Sifuentes, told the Express-News that his client will be appealing the suspension, because the alleged sandwich incident never really happened.
Sifuentes said Luckhurst joked about giving a sandwich filled with feces to a homeless person, but he never actually did it.
This article has been updated to include comment from Luckhurst’s lawyer.
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