Background check missed US deputy’s red flags before killings in sextortion case

This photo provided by the Riverside Police Department shows Austin Lee Edwards, the suspect in a triple homicide in Southern California who died in a shootout with police on Nov 25, 2022. A background investigator erroneously failed to check a would-be trooper's mental health history, allowing him to be hired for the Virginia State Police the year before he catfished and kidnapped a 15-year-old girl and killed three members of her family in California, according to officials in a letter Dec 30, 2022. — Riverside Police Department via AP

A background investigator failed to check a would-be trooper’s mental health history, allowing him to be hired for the Virginia State Police the year before he sexually extorted and kidnapped a 15-year-old girl and killed three members of her family in California, officials said.

Col. Gary Settle, the Virginia State Police superintendent, wrote in a Dec 30 letter to the state’s inspector general that the hiring of Austin Lee Edwards, despite his 2016 involuntary admittance to a psychiatric facility, was “the direct result of human error” and appeared to be an isolated incident.