Ex-Deputy Aaron Westrick Labeled Whistleblower

Port Huron Times Herald in MIchigan reports that former sheriff’s deputy Aaron Westrick helped expose bullet-proof vest scandal.

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EX-DEPUTY HELPED EXPOSE VEST SCANDAL

By: Shannon Murphy

Aaron Westrick had recently started his job as a deputy at the St. Clair County Sheriff Department in 1982 when he was shot in the chest while chasing a suspect.

Today, Westrick is in the middle of a Justice Department criminal investigation into Second Chance Body Armor Inc. – the same Michigan company that made the bulletproof vest he credits with saving his life more than 20 years ago.

Westrick, 44, of Boyne City is being labeled a whistleblower for coming forward with problems in certain bulletproof vests sold by Second Chance, which is headquartered in Antrim County’s Central Lake. He is the former research chief for the company, which laid him off last year.

The company, which issued a recall for the vests and said it will cooperate with the federal probe, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. It’s the nation’s largest bulletproof vest maker.

The Justice Department is investigating whether the company sold defective bulletproof vests to local police, federal agents, the military and even the Secret Service for President Bush and the first lady and failed to alert anyone for two years after Westrick warned company officials.

A material in the vests, Zylon, has been found to deteriorate under certain conditions. There have been at least two reported cases nationwide of the vests failing, leading to the death of one officer and injury to another.

Westrick now works as an associate professor of criminology and director of the Institute for Public Safety at Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie.

“Wearing Second Chance armor (the night I was shot) was how I eventually ended up there. I was the most loyal person to Second Chance,” Westrick said Friday. “I truly believed in them.”

Westrick said he tried to alert company officials of the problem in 2001, but it wasn’t until 2003 that officials told consumers about problems with the vests.

“My police instincts were ringing and my moral instincts were going through the roof,” Westrick said of finding out about the problem with the vests.

As a former police officer, Westrick felt it was his duty to protect those he had worked with for nearly 25 years. He thought about his friends in St. Clair County, who were wearing Second Chance vests and of his own experience being shot.

“The bullet hit my flashlight, went through part of my hand, hit me underneath my badge and stopped in my body armor,” he said of the 1982 shooting at Dove and Range roads. “He was five feet away from me.”

“I just think, do they understand the damage they’ve done to police officers?” he said of Second Chance. “The confidence of the police, in my opinion, is disintegrated. You don’t pull the trigger often, but when you do, you have to have confidence it works.

“That’s what’s so painful about that, not counting the officers killed and injured. What about my friends here? What about their confidence in their equipment?”

Port Huron police Lt. Don Porrett wore one of the Second Chance vests under investigation for about three years – until he received a letter about the Zylon material.

The company offered to fix the vest by adding another padding to it or replacing it, Porrett said. He opted to get a new one.

“I started investigating getting another one because I’d lost confidence in the vest,” he said. “I felt we were duped because it didn’t stand up to what they said it did.”

Westrick said now that he has the confidence of the government and local police, he doesn’t lose sleep over this fight anymore.

“If people take the time to understand this situation, then being called a whistleblower, in this context, I’m not ashamed of it. Not one bit,” he said. “I’ve done the best I can do, and over time people will understand that more and more.”