Erie Police officer James Cousins said he “embellished” the comments he made in a bar where he was mocking the shooting death of a man and his grief-stricken mother.
An Erie police officer says mocking comments he made in a barroom recording that was posted on YouTube were embellished or untrue and that he made the comments to make himself seem more important to the incident than he really was.
Officer James Cousins II is suspended without pay for the eight-minute rant in which he joked about a man’s shooting death and mocked the reaction of the dead man’s mother.
Cousins says in a letter of apology that he “brought great shame to a good city.”