Editorial: Police silence about shootings speaks volumes

How long can police remain silent about a shooting?

Quite a while, it seems.

On Feb. 14, yellow crime scene tape went up around McKinley Avenue in East Vandergrift. It happened after a raid on an apartment above the post office. The U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force was leading the raid, which included participation from state troopers and Vandergrift police.

In the course of the raid, a man was shot. He was arrested and taken to the hospital.

For almost two weeks, little more was known.

While police are still tight-lipped about the incident, court documents this week did do the bare minimum: They revealed the name of the man shot and arrested.

Lyle Cessna, 52, of East Vandergrift was arrested on an incest charge. Police say he was shot after he tried to flee, held a gun to his head and fired it, only to have it malfunction, and then turn the gun on officers.

Cessna’s arrest was part of a larger investigation involving child pornography. Police also charged Ty Cessna, 25, of Rayburn Township with incest and more than 600 counts of child pornography. Ty Cessna is Lyle Cessna’s son. Lyle Cessna was still in the hospital after his arraignment Thursday and has a preliminary hearing scheduled for March 11. Ty Cessna has waived his right to a hearing on the charges and is free of $50,000 bond.

The issue is not the guilt or innocence of either man or the charges they faced or even whether police did the right thing in shooting Lyle Cessna.

It is that this is the latest example of information being withheld regarding a police shooting.

It was only Feb. 18 that details finally began to come to light about the shooting of Christopher Allie, 38, of Pittsburgh’s Carrick neighborhood, in a Feb. 10 shooting in a Munhall jail cell.

That follows months of Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. withholding the names of SWAT officers who shot a mentally ill man in Upper St. Clair in January 2024. That wasn’t the only case in 2024 in which names were kept confidential.

But in the fatal shootings of Austyn Cousins that same month, Charles McGrath and Selwyn Brown in June 2024 and Gregory Carlson in July 2024, it was the police officers who were kept quiet.

This shouldn’t happen. The people have a right to know who held the gun that shot someone — whether the actions were vindicated or not.

But when the name being withheld is that of a person shot, it feels more questionable. In both the Munhall and East Vandergrift cases, these were people who were arrested. That puts them into the system and creates a paper trail of the interaction with police. In addition to the docket information, there are affidavits of probable cause that spell out the backstory and circumstances of the arrest.

How can a law enforcement agency justify shooting a person and keeping the name under wraps?

“Whether it’s good guy, bad buy, it doesn’t matter,” said John Rago, associate professor of law at Duquesne University. “There has to be accountability for that.”

Providing information is not an indictment of the victim or the officer. It is simply information.

And silence is always more suspicious than answering a question.