A retired Porter County Sheriff’s Police officer has been charged with strangulation, intimidation, and domestic battery following an incident on Thursday at his residence in Center Township.

John M. “Mike” Jenkins, however, was not taken into custody at the time by Indiana State Police troopers tasked to investigate the incident at the request of the PCSP. He was formally charged late Friday afternoon and later surrendered himself, Porter County Prosecuting Attorney Brian Gensel said today.

According to probable cause affidavits filed by an ISP trooper, shortly before 10:45 p.m. Jenkins placed his hands around the neck of a woman at his residence at 2158 Carlisle Lane and applied pressure, threatened to shoot her to death and then himself, and struck the woman about the body and face as well as pulled her hair and bit her.

Strangulation and intimidation are both Class D felonies punishable by a term of six months to three years. Domestic battery is a Class A misdemeanor punishable by a term of up to a year.

Jenkins, who retired around three years ago with the rank of captain, served with the PCSP for 25 years and at one time commanded its Detective Bureau.

Although it’s not the official policy of the PCSP to ask other police agencies to investigate incidents involving its officers—or, for that matter, its retired officers—Sheriff Dave Lain told the Chesterton Tribune this morning that it’s generally a good idea. “There are too many pitfalls for us to investigate one of our own,” he said. “We’re confident that our investigators will do a good job, but some citizens believe that an agency takes care of its own. We’re better off, both to avoid the uncomfortable dynamic that would go on there of people having to arrest a person they used to work with for years, and to assure citizens that there’s no coloring of the investigation.”

Lain declined to comment on the decision of the ISP troopers not to take Jenkins immediately into custody. “I’m not an armchair quarterback,” he said. “I don’t think that’s good business, second-guessing another agency’s investigation.”

Troopers did not arrest Jenkins on the spot for two reasons, Det. Glen Edmondson of the ISP told the Tribune. First, they were under the impression that both Jenkins and the woman had “been involved in the fight,” he said. Second, “we weren’t given any information which way to proceed” from the Porter County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.

Gensel, though, said that when contacted early Friday morning he specifically instructed the troopers “to treat this case like any other domestic violence case.”

Instead, Gensel said, “the State Police after the investigation felt that under the circumstances they would file a report and a request for an arrest warrant. That was the decision they made.”

Gensel did say that, in his view, the PCSP made the “appropriate decision to ask an outside agency to investigate one of its former officers.”

Posted 5/27/2008