Easton Had Two Police Shootings 10 Years Ago

On Tuesday night, a man was shot by an Easton police officer in the city's South Side.

As of Wednesday evening, city police had said very little about the incident, beyond  and the officer -- Patrolman Eric Campbell -- who did the shooting.

Covering the shooting late last Tuesday night (and early Wednesday morning), I realized I'd been in similar situations 10 years ago.

Twice in 2002, while working as a newspaper reporter, I covered incidents in Easton where city police officers used their firearms during an investigation.

The first case happened in February, just a few blocks from the scene of last week's shooting.

On the night of Feb. 25, 2002, a man named Michael Hogan was shot and wounded by police in his home at 837 W. Grant St. after threatening officers with a rifle. The officers had responded to the home for a domestic disturbance. 

Hogan was shot in the stomach and both hands. His right ring finger was amputated. 

A few weeks later, District Attorney John Morganelli said the police were justified in the shooting.

"Any individual who decides to arm himself with a deadly weapon and threatens harm to another takes the risk that he himself may be harmed or even killed," Morganelli said at the time.

The case eventually went to civil court, with Hogan and his wife filing a federal excessive force lawsuit against the officers who shot him.

Hogan had pleaded guilty to making terroristic threats and reckless endangerment, and received a 12-48 month prison sentence.

He had argued in court that he was surrending to police when he was shot. In April 2007, the police were cleared by a jury. 

A few months after the Hogan case began, a man named Anthony Jones was shot and wounded by police during a bank robbery investigation.

Jones was wanted by the FBI for robbing a bank in Bethlehem Township. Police got word he was in the city, and an officer pulled him over in the West Ward.

Jones ran from his van, but then got back in it, and tried to run over a patrolman named Charles Leauber.

Leauber fired on Jones' van, with one bullet hitting Jones in the leg. Jones hid out in a house on Lehigh Street, but police followed a blood trail and arrested him.

I covered the initial shooting, and part of Jones' trial in  in March and April 2004.

He represented himself, and I remember the judge's patience wearing thin on the final day of the trial. (At one point, Jones referred to a forensics witness as "the lab dude.")

Yet the jury found at least part of his defense credible, acquitting him of attempted homicide and aggravated assault charges but convicting him of reckless endangerment, resisting arrest and three weapons charges.

He still received a lengthy prison term, 15-23 years on the local charges on top of a 15-year federal sentence for the bank robbery.