A retired Baltimore police sergeant will enter a guilty plea next week after prosecutors allege he planted evidence at a 2014 crime scene.
According to The Baltimore Sun, Keith Gladstone was out to dinner with another officer when he received a frantic phone call from his mentee, Sgt. Wayne Jenkins who said he ran down a man with his car in Northeast Baltimore.
Gladstone allegedly got a BB gun from the trunk of his police car and drove it to the scene. When he arrived he “dropped the BB gun near a pickup truck” as the man named Demetric Simon laid on the ground injured. Per an indictment, Jenkins told another officer to move the BB gun closer to Simon.
During an interview with The Sun, Simon denies having any weapons on his person, especially a BB gun. “I never had no BB gun,” Simon last year. “I never aimed nothing at him. He ran me over because I was getting away.”
Gladstone and Jenkins often collaborated together before Jenkins went on to lead the corrupt Gun Trace Task Force Unit. He’s now serving 25 years in federal prison.
New charges outline Jenkins wrote the false police statement against Simon and attributed it to another cop who was at the scene.
It appears Gladstone’s unethical ways have caught up to him. He reportedly worked in high-ranking drug units despite misconduct accusations that included being reprimanded by a federal judge and also being found liable by a civil jury for assaulting a man in 2015 during an arrest.
Gladstone has been charged with conspiracy to deprive civil rights, conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States and witness tampering. If convicted of all three, he could face 20 years in prison.
