The city of Lake Oswego fired one of its officers late last year after determining that he sicced his police dog on a man who was not a criminal suspect, lied about it afterward and gave a phony excuse for why his body camera wasn’t activated to record the encounter.
Police Chief George Burke fired Officer Erich Mayr last December, and the state agency that oversees police officer certifications hasn’t yet decided whether it’ll review Mayr’s case to possibly revoke his credentials at a future meeting. The Oregonian/OregonLive learned about Mayr’s firing after filing a public records request — because the city previously would say only that an unnamed officer had left the force last year for reasons that were confidential.
The city provided documents naming Mayr and outlining why a police captain and lieutenant recommended Burke fire him in response to the news organization’s request.
Reached by phone last week, Mayr declined to comment. Mayr, 37, had been a Lake Oswego police officer for nine years.
The sequence of events that led to Mayr’s firing began on July 10, 2023, when he and his police dog, Szemi, were summoned to unincorporated Clackamas County near Happy Valley to help Clackamas County Sheriff’s deputies track a suspect who had eluded police, crashed his car and ran. According to police documents, the passenger also ran, but a deputy told Mayr she was only interested in the driver since the passenger was not suspected of committing any crimes.
Nonetheless, Lake Oswego police investigators found that Mayr and his dog tracked the passenger, who had last been seen along that sidewalk near Southeast Bob Schumacher Road and Old Town Court.
Szemi ended up finding the passenger, Jose Manuel Soto-Nene Jr., hiding in some bushes along the sidewalk and biting him in the buttocks, according to the investigation. The investigation found that Mayr should have known the dog had found the passenger and that — despite that — he commanded the dog to “fas, fas, fas,” which is an order to bite a person. The dog responded by continuing to bite, at one point puncturing Soto-Nene’s arm, according to the investigation.
Mayr told investigators he ordered the dog to bite because Soto-Nene grabbed the dog’s face. But investigators said there was no evidence of that, rather it appeared from video recorded by another law enforcement officer’s body camera that Soto-Nene had raised his arms in a defensive position in order to protect his body.
Though Mayr wrote in his police report that “law abiding citizens with nothing to hide …do not run from police,” his supervisors noted that that didn’t justify directing a police dog to bite him. Oregon court records show Soto-Nene has no criminal history in the state, and he was charged with no crimes stemming from the July 2023 encounter.
Soto-Nene was treated at a local hospital. He has not filed a lawsuit against the city.
The driver also was later found nearby and surrendered. It’s unclear what happened to him or if he was charged with any crimes because the documents provided to The Oregonian/OregonLive don’t include that information.
The investigation’s primary focus was Mayr, and Lt. Jacob Jones found that despite Mayr’s explanation that he thought his body camera would automatically activate, he knew that he had to manually activate it because it previously had been docked in his car and he had done so “on numerous occasions” in the past.
The lieutenant also added that he believed Mayr “chose to be deceitful … to try and avoid discipline.”
Capt. Clayton Simon also wrote that he found “little credibility” in Mayr’s explanations.
“His inability or unwillingness to recognize his mistakes, accept responsibility for his actions, and be truthful in his account of events makes his continued employment as a police officer with the City of Lake Oswego unsustainable,” Simon wrote.
Burke, the police chief, said he decided Mayr could no longer work as a Lake Oswego police officer because officers must remain “truthful and honest and upfront” to maintain the public’s trust.
“Community trust is everything,” Burke said. “In the law enforcement profession, my integrity has to be above everything.”
Burke said Szemi is back at work with a new handler.
“The dog did what the dog was trained to do, so it’s not a dog issue,” Burke said.
Mayr is the second officer on the force of 48 sworn officers to be fired or to resign in response to reports of wrongdoing within the past year. Last year, Officer Michael Svoboda, 35, resigned after having sex while on duty in a parking lot of a Lake Oswego office building. He was convicted of official misconduct, sentenced to probation and agreed to forfeit his law enforcement certification.
“It costs us more to have people like that working for us,” Burke said. “And we have plenty of really, really good people who want to do the job and want to do it well. We’re better off replacing those people than being in a position where we have people who are really going to ruin the reputation of the city and the profession that we work in.”
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