What happened at the secret bond hearing for a police officer charged with murder? Now we know.

After a judge barred the public and news media from an April 2021 bond hearing for a Newport News police officer charged with murder, the question quickly arose:

What happened at the secret proceeding?

Now we know.

The Daily Press and Virginian-Pilot challenged the courtroom closure on First Amendment grounds. The Virginia Supreme Court sided with the newspapers last year, ruling the hearing should have been open — and ordering its transcript to be unsealed.

The discussion at the hearing, the transcript shows, centered on two events that prosecutors found in Sgt. Albin Trevor Pearson’s personnel record.

• A 2012 case in which the officer was reprimanded for driving in his unmarked police car after drinking. He wasn’t working at the time, and whether he was on call was in dispute.

• A 2015 case in which Pearson was accused of pulling his police handgun on restaurant patrons he was feuding with, again while off-duty.

The newspapers obtained the recently unsealed 31-page transcript, which provides details about the incidents logged in Pearson’s personnel record — and arguments attorneys made about how they should factor into a bond determination.

At the time of the bond hearing, Pearson was being charged with second-degree murder in the December 2019 shooting of 43-year-old Henry “Hank” K. Berry III.

Pearson, a 12-year veteran of the department, shot Berry during a struggle over a Taser after four officers chased him into his Oyster Point apartment without a warrant. They were trying to arrest him on a misdemeanor charge of abusing the city’s 911 system.

The 36-year-old officer was convicted in September of voluntary manslaughter and illegal entry, and was sentenced to six years in prison.

But in April 2021 — as Pearson was out on bond — the prosecutor on the murder case contended the incidents newly disclosed in the officer’s personnel file warranted him being taken into custody pending trial.

“These circumstances make this defendant a much more real danger to the community than you previously knew,” Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Brandon Wrobleski, a Suffolk prosecutor handling the case, told the judge. “These incidents should give the Court a real concern.”

But defense attorney Timothy Clancy said nothing in Pearson’s personnel files warranted revoking his bond — or even changing it.

“What we have here is a bunch of nothing,” Clancy told the judge.

In the end, Circuit Court Judge Margaret Poles Spencer allowed Pearson to remain free pending trial, though she ordered him to refrain from alcohol and to undergo weekly and random alcohol screening.

Wrobleski made the initial request that the bond hearing be closed to the public, citing the officer’s right to a fair trial and contending pre-trial publicity could make it difficult to find impartial jurors during a pandemic.

Clancy joined in the request to close the courtroom, though he said he “candidly” did not have any case law to back a secret hearing. Spencer closed the courtroom over the newspapers’ objection.

In October, about a month after Pearson’s manslaughter conviction, the seven-member Virginia Supreme Court sided with the newspapers — saying Spencer was wrong to close the hearing. In addition to ordering the release of the transcript, the court also ordered Spencer to determine whether 450 pages of other documents also should be unsealed.

The personnel files

The transcript shows the closed hearing delved into two events in Pearson’s Newport News Police Department personnel file.

In the June 2012 case, two police sergeants were working an extra-duty shift at the Brickhouse Tavern, a restaurant in Port Warwick. They didn’t know Pearson personally, “but knew him to be a police officer,” Wrobleski said. They saw him drinking “for some time,” watching him leave and get into his unmarked police car.

The sergeants trailed Pearson, pulling him over. One of the sergeants said the odor of alcohol coming from Pearson and his car was “strong,” Wrobleski said. But the sergeant told investigators he didn’t call dispatchers, in part because the TV program “Cops” was filming in Newport News at the time.

“The sergeant did not want to bring any embarrassment to the department by stopping the defendant, a police officer, in his police car for a DUI,” Wrobleski told Spencer. The incident was reported internally, however, and Pearson lost the use of a take-home car for six months, the prosecutor said.

There was a dispute at the bond hearing over whether Pearson was on-call for work at the time, with Wrobleski contending he was in an on-call status and Clancy asserting he was not.

In April 2015, Wrobleski said, Pearson was at another restaurant, RJ’s Sports Pub, with his then-girlfriend when she referred to a nearby pool table as “the terrorists’ table.”

The three men at that table — two of whom were Muslim — heard the reference, Wrobleski said. As the bar was closing, the girlfriend said loudly that she and Pearson should “get out of here before the terrorists blow the place up like Chicago on 9/11.”

One of the men corrected her, pointing out the 2001 attacks took place in New York City. In the parking lot, Wrobleski said, one of the men said he saw Pearson “sitting in the driver’s seat of his truck and staring at him.”

According to Wrobleski’s account, the unarmed man walked over to the truck and told Pearson, “What your girlfriend said was not okay.”

Wrobleski told the judge that Pearson pulled out his police handgun, pointed it at the man and said, “Get the (expletive) out of here, or I’m going to blow your heads off,” then showed his badge and said, “I’m a cop, mother (expletive). Now what?”

The prosecutor said Pearson’s girlfriend smacked a cell phone out of the hand of another man who was filming the scene, breaking the screen. The girlfriend called 911, saying the group was threatening her and Pearson.

Patrol officers soon arrived. They asked one of the men to take a breath test, and he blew well below the threshold for drunken driving. Pearson wasn’t asked to take such a test, even as Wrobleski said he had been “drinking at the bar for some time” and had a $70 tab.

No arrests were made. The three men filed a complaint to the Newport News Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office, which asked police to open a criminal investigation into Pearson.

Wrobleski said several people alleged Pearson pulled his gun, including a promoter at RJ’s who wasn’t involved. But a detective found that no charges could be filed “because the elements of brandishing a firearm had not been satisfied,” Wrobleski said.

The detective’s report, the prosecutor said, “was a comparison of alleged inconsistencies and the statements of the four independent witnesses.” However, Pearson’s then-girlfriend was charged with assault and battery for breaking the man’s cell phone.

Arguments over revoking bond

Wrobleski contended Pearson posed “a danger to the community,” asserting the two incidents warranted revoking his bond and jailing him pending trial. At the time, the officer had been out on a $200,000 bond since his November 2020 arrest.

Barring revoking the bond, Wrobleski asked that it be “significantly increased” and that the officer be ordered to refrain from alcohol and wear an alcohol monitoring bracelet.

But Clancy contended the 2012 and 2015 cases were thoroughly investigated by detectives and internal affairs officers, and there was nothing there.

“There was no probable cause to believe that (Pearson) had done anything wrong,” Clancy said of the 2015 restaurant incident.

Instead, Clancy said, investigators found Pearson “acted absolutely appropriately under the circumstances,” including telling the other group he was a police officer, showing his badge and holding his gun against his chest and saying, “Stay away.”

In contrast to Wrobleski’s account, Clancy said when a police investigator asked the man who had approached the truck whether Pearson had pointed his handgun at him, the man said he did not.

“Nah man, didn’t point the gun,” he said, according to Clancy.

Officer body camera footage, Clancy said, shows Pearson “remained on scene and cooperated fully with investigators.”

In the 2012 case, Clancy said, both sergeants who stopped Pearson said “unequivocally” that he wasn’t drunk, even as he violated department policy by driving a city car after drinking.

“That’s why they pulled him over, and he was sanctioned for that,” Clancy said. “Neither of these sergeants would suggest for a moment that he was intoxicated.”

“I don’t think anything you’ve heard today, judge, would suggest in any form or fashion that he constitutes a danger to this community,” Clancy concluded, noting that Pearson had abided by all of his bond conditions since his arrest.

Given the last word, Wrobleski disputed Clancy’s contention.

“If this is a bunch of nothing ... then we all need to recalibrate our idea of what criminal justice is,” said the prosecutor, who now works for the Virginia Attorney General’s Office.

In the driving after drinking case, he said, Pearson was not subjected to the same sobriety tests — such as reciting part of the alphabet — that others might have endured. In fact, Wrobleski said, Pearson got additional responsibilities after the incident and was made a sergeant in the department’s gang unit.

For the 2015 restaurant altercation, Wrobleski appeared to disagree with a police detective’s decision not to charge Pearson with brandishing a gun, saying the investigator discounted “four eyewitnesses corroborating that offense.”

“This incident was so egregious that the local prosecutor’s office felt obligated to have one of their attorneys report a police officer for a criminal investigation,” Wrobleski said. “Sometimes a person’s danger to the community is ... inherent in the facts of the case.”

But at the end of the hearing, Spencer allowed Pearson to remain free pending trial, though she did modify his bond conditions. The information she learned at the hearing, she said, caused her “to have some concern about the defendant’s behavior and his consumption of ... alcohol.”

She initially said she would order Pearson to wear an alcohol monitoring bracelet on his ankle. But in a discussion on how that would be paid for, she later amended it to require that he show up at the probation office for weekly, but random alcohol tests.

Court transparency

Immediately after the closed hearing, Spencer denied a request from the Pilot and Daily Press for a transcript. She issued a public order saying she “denies the commonwealth’s motion to revoke the defendant’s bond,” adding that Pearson must refrain from alcohol and submit to weekly and random alcohol and drug screening.

In its October 2022 ruling, the Virginia Supreme Court said the reasons Spencer cited for barring public access to the hearing — such as a mere possibility that the pandemic could make it difficult to seat a jury — were inadequate. It was the first time the high court ruled specifically on a challenge to a bond hearing’s closure.

“Except in the rarest of circumstances, (a decision on bond) ... must be made in open court so that the public ... would know how and why, not simply what, the court has ruled,” Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote in a 28-page unanimous opinion.

Another 450 pages of sealed documents from the court file are still in dispute. That includes about 91 pages for the prosecution’s motion to revoke Pearson’s bond and the related police internal affairs documents. It also includes about 350 pages of sealed documents pertaining to a separate legal issue unrelated to the bond hearing.

A hearing on the matter is scheduled for April 24.

Clancy declined last week to talk about the closed April 2021 bond hearing — and said Pearson, now at the Western Tidewater Regional Jail, would have no comment. The officer’s manslaughter conviction is under appeal, the lawyer said.

Pearson’s father, Troy Pearson, declined to talk about the personnel issues, but said his son’s prosecution on the 2019 charges resulted in lost contributions to society “from a caring and generous man.”

His son, he said, was active in his church and has always tried to help those in need, including fixing broken cars for the elderly, buying a bike for a boy who had his stolen, and “using his money to help save a dog found hit on the road.”

The officer was shot at while on duty, his father said, and once climbed onto a burning roof to rescue three people, two of whom survived.

“That’s what he’s done for this community,” the elder Pearson said. “He’s not the monster they’re making him out to be. The kid gives the shirt off his back to everybody.”

Peter Dujardin, 757-247-4749, pdujardin@dailypress.com