Aurora city officials have four business days to name a new interim police chief after the man slated to take over the spot announced on Christmas Eve that he won’t take the job after all.
The time crunch comes after Deputy Chief Paul O’Keefe, who had been named to take over department leadership when current Chief Nick Metz retires at the end of the year, announced in an email to city officials that he would no longer take the job. Instead, he said he will retire in March.
The change of plans comes in the wake of public scrutiny of the way O’Keefe and others in the police department handled a March incident in which an on-duty, armed and uniformed police officer passed out drunk while driving a police vehicle.
The officer was not cited for DUI and was allowed to keep his job, although he was suspended and demoted. O’Keefe was the first person from the Aurora Police Department to arrive at the scene; he wrote in a report obtained by The Denver Post that he while he smelled alcohol on the officer, he decided not to have the incident be investigated as a DUI because he thought the officer was suffering from a medical episode.
The officer later admitted he’d gone home to drink vodka during his shift, and said he blacked out behind the wheel.
Aurora City Manager Jim Twombly, who will pick the police departmentap next interim chief, said Monday it was premature to discuss who that leader might be.
“We will obviously need to act quickly,” he said in an email.
O’Keefe said in the Christmas Eve email to officials that he hoped the decision to pull out of the interim chief position would help the police department “move beyond the negative depiction currently being broadcast.”
Other top cops at the department include Division Chiefs Harry Glidden, Ernie Ortiz and Vanessa Wilson, according to the city’s website.
