POLICE SHOULDN’T REPEATEDLY CAUSE EMBARRASSMENT

The cops arrived before 8:30 Monday morning. Two wore uniforms and drove a police cruiser. Two came in plain clothes in an unmarked car. Kay Liverman spotted them out the window.

They descended on her Ivy Farms home as if they were on a tactical mission. An officer set up on each side of the back of the house. The other two trooped to the front door.

Inside, Liverman felt alarmed, then upset. Anyone passing by would clearly think something terrible was happening at her home.

And it was. Liverman was about to be embarrassed in front of her neighbors for something she hadn’t done, something she had assiduously tried to avoid.

“We need to talk to Brian Liverman,” the police at the front door said, referring to her son.

“He’s not here,” Liverman answered.

“We need to talk to him,” the cops persisted. “We have a warrant for his arrest.”

“He’s already in jail,” Liverman said.

In fact, crimes associated with Brian Liverman’s drug addiction landed him in prison in July 1998. Those crimes have become his law-abiding parents’ nightmare – breaking and entering, using stolen credit cards, trying to cash a stolen check, theft. Eventually, a Newport News circuit judge hammered him with a five-year prison sentence.

His mother has accepted that consequence. She doesn’t make excuses for her son’s crimes. But Monday it seemed to Liverman that an indifferent justice system was rubbing salt in her still-open emotional wounds.

“My husband and I have been through pure hell with our son,” she said miserably late Monday morning. “It’s like we’re being punished.”

Punished when they’d done all they possibly could to straighten out what was clearly a bureaucratic mess. The warrant that Newport News police tried to serve at Liverman’s home Monday was issued in York County. It related to a July 27, 1998, trial – a misdemeanor larceny case – for which Brian Liverman was sentenced to 20 days in jail, community service and probation. He never reported to the probation office or showed up to do his community service. So an arrest warrant was issued for failure to appear.

Liverman said her son couldn’t appear, because he was already locked up, first in the Newport News City Jail, then in the Hampton Roads Regional Jail, then in the state Department of Corrections. In fact, Liverman said her son had to be transported from Newport News City Jail to York General District Court to stand trial. He was taken back to jail as soon as the case ended.

But the tale doesn’t end there. In February of this year, a letter from Newport News police arrived at Liverman’s house addressed to her son. The letter informed her son that the cops had an outstanding warrant for his arrest. The letter urged Brian Liverman “to avoid any unnecessary embarrassment” by coming to police headquarters any time, day or night, to let the police serve the warrant on him.

Kay Liverman said she called the number on the letter the day she received it. She said she told an officer in warrant control that her son was not living with her, that he was in jail.

“He was very nice,” Liverman recalled. “But when I asked how come the police didn’t know my son was in prison, he said that York County had issued the warrant and Newport News had to serve it.”

So Liverman said she called York County and told someone there about her son.

Liverman did everything she could to correct the situation. Until Monday’s upsetting encounter with police, she had no reason to think it had not been taken care of.

But that presumed that everyone was reading from the same page, when, in fact, no one was.

The judge in York County did note that Brian Liverman was in jail when he sentenced him to 20 days, community service and probation in July 1998, prosecutor Eileen Addison said.

But Liverman was supposed to report to York probation officials as soon as he got out. York probation officials noticed Liverman had charges brought against him in August and October of 1998, Addison said, and must have assumed he was out. In fact, police added those charges to Liverman’s rap sheet as he sat in jail without bond for an earlier probation violation, his mother said.

Newport News City Jail and Hampton Roads Regional Jail administrators confirm that. They say Brian Liverman was taken into custody July 11, 1998, on check charges and a probation violation and hasn’t been free since.

“If he can show that he was incarcerated on offenses dating prior to July 27, 1998, and that he never got out of jail,” said Addison, the failure- to-appear charge likely would be dropped.

The way things have gone, nothing’s for sure.

At the time in January 2000 that York court officials decided they wanted to issue a failure-to- appear warrant for Brian Liverman, they knew he was locked up in a state prison in Haynesville, Va., not living at home. But in a court document issued at the time, Addison said the York probation department listed Liverman’s release date from prison as April 7, 2000.

A state Department of Corrections spokesman said the earliest possible release date for Brian Liverman is April 7, 2002.

As for Newport News police, no one from the warrant control office remembers talking to Kay Liverman in February, a spokeswoman said. But, she added, “we handle 900 warrants a month.”

“When somebody calls, we try to check with the Department of Corrections,” Officer Dierdre Raines continued. “We do the best we can. If this one fell through the cracks, we apologize.”

Kay Liverman accepts that apology. She just wonders why it didn’t come Monday morning as she was being humiliated. But most of all, she wishes that the various branches of the justice system could get their acts together.

Regardless of her son’s criminal history, that’s not such an outrageous request. A single conclusion can be drawn from this series of miscommunications:

The embarrassment was unnecessary.

Jim Spencer can be reached at 247-4731 or by e-mail at jlspencer@dailypress.com or Talk Back to Jim Spencer at dailypress.com/spencer.htm