A fired University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff police officer kept her policing certification Wednesday after a state board decided the evidence she lied about her response to an October 2024 campus shooting was too thin.
The Commission on Law Enforcement Standards and Training rejected a request from the UAPB Police Department to decertify Magian Hardy over inconsistencies between her report and interview and video footage of the Oct. 24, 2024, shooting in a parking lot after the university’s homecoming bonfire celebration that wounded two people, one of them a minor.
Hardy was one of five officers whom the commission considered decertifying on Wednesday, the second day and final day of its February session, and the only one who kept her credentials.
On the night of the shooting, Hardy, who said she’s worked as a Dumas police officer since September, was the closest officer to the scene. She pulled into the parking lot and exited her vehicle around the time the first shots were fired, according to surveillance footage shown Wednesday.
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In her report, Hardy indicated she saw gunfire come from a white vehicle, but Maj. Theodore Haase, who investigated the shooting and questioned Hardy, said Wednesday that the gunfire came from a different vehicle, and sparred at length with Hardy’s attorney, Priscilla Neeley, about whether or not vehicles in the video footage matched Hardy’s description.
Neeley asked the commission to deny the decertification request on the grounds that the state Department of Public Safety hadn’t adequately proven the facts of its case without calling on Hardy or any other witnesses.
Five commission members — White County Sheriff Phillip Miller, Jefferson County Sheriff Lafayette Woods, Fayetteville Police Chief Mike Reynolds, James Montgomery and Richard Winguard — voted to dismiss the case, while two — Barry Phillips and Thomas Marsh — voted against it.
Hardy didn’t lie, Neeley argued, even if some of the statements she made were overly broad. The police officials investigating Hardy added their own “subjective annotations” to her statements that convinced them she lied about what she saw.
“It’s almost as if they looked to discredit her,” Neeley said.
University police Chief Tony Jordan wasn’t satisfied with how Hardy reacted to the active shooting, and that factored into why he fired her, he said, but the decertification request centered on what he viewed as untruthfulness in her report and description of the shooting.
Also Wednesday, the commission unanimously decertified James Stone, a former Little Rock police officer who resigned in 2024 before the department could fire him after an internal investigation substantiated complaints against him, including one that he had inappropriate contact with a woman he met responding to her attempted suicide.
Stone didn’t appear for his hearing Wednesday, despite signing a document saying he planned to appear.
Under the guise of checking on her well-being, Stone contacted the woman and visited her home, where he asked her if he could use her shower and change clothes and then lay on her bed and watched a movie with her, said Maj. Jonathan Prater, who oversaw the department’s investigation. Stone asked the woman to cuddle, which she refused, but told investigators she felt pressured.
“What may well have begun as Stone’s legitimate empathy for the young woman morphed into something that frankly, turned a little creepy, for lack of a better term,” said Steve Taylor, an attorney for the Public Safety Department who was arguing for Stone’s decertification.
The woman’s sister made a complaint about Stone when police responded to another attempt by the woman to end her own life, Prater said.
In a separate incident, when Stone took a woman to a hospital emergency room after her suicide attempt, he was insulting and combative with the woman and other patients and rude to medical staff, said Little Rock police Sgt. Alec Tiner, who handled that part of the investigation.
Stone was still in his probationary period at the department, and one police official wrote in the investigative file that the department should fire Stone “immediately, before he can do more damage to the department,” Taylor said. After the hearing, Taylor said he couldn’t immediately recall which official that was.
The commission also decertified Daniel Newton, a former Hot Springs Village police officer fired in June 2024 after Benton police arrested him on a domestic violence count and alerted his employer there was a warrant out for Newton’s arrest on a second-degree sexual assault charge in Bentonville.
That sexual assault charge, which occurred while Newton was in the military, was abandoned by prosecutors, Newton said, and a judge agreed to dismiss the domestic violence charge, which stemmed from a drunken fight with his wife, if he maintained good behavior for a year. Newton’s wife, Ashley, and baby daughter were at Wednesday’s hearing, and his wife said Newton isn’t drinking excessively anymore and wants to change his ways.
Two other respondents, like Stone, didn’t show up for the hearings they requested, and the commission decertified them.
The first, former Texarkana police officer Danielle Burns, resigned before department officials could fire her after she lied about being subpoenaed to testify for the prosecution in a Texas court, Texarkana police Lt. Rick Cockrell said.
In fact, Burns attempted to testify against the state on behalf of a friend while in uniform and was removed from the court because neither party requested her presence, Cockrell said. Her lie left the department critically short-handed on that day, he said.
The second was former Arkansas State Police Trooper Trip Hensley, who wrote traffic citations he didn’t tell motorists about and made others up entirely, resulting in people having their licenses suspended for not paying fines they weren’t aware they owed and even the issue of arrest warrants for some of those motorists.
State police officials fired Hensley in November 2024 after he admitted to padding his record with the improper or bogus citations and told an investigator he learned he wasn’t cut out to be a state trooper.