A longtime Chandler police officer who quit his job in June 2017 after driving with a .31 blood alcohol concentration and crashing his unmarked police vehicle into a pole while off-duty is charged with multiple felonies in two subsequent DUI cases, including one set for trial this summer.
Garrett Albert Dever was indicted by a Maricopa County grand jury last year for felony aggravated assault and two counts of Aggravated DUI stemming from a February 2019 incident. Court documents reveal little about the case although there is reference in the file to victim medical records.
Last week a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ordered Dever, 42, to stand for a jury trial in that case starting Sept. 29. But that is not the only active DUI charges filed against Dever.
On May 27, Judge Michael Barth will preside over a preliminary hearing on several Aggravated DUI felonies initially filed against Dever in April 2018. In Arizona, three DUI convictions in a seven-year period triggers substantially harsher sentences, including mandatory incarceration.
Dever was raised in St. David and is the son of the late Cochise County Sheriff Larry A. Dever. He went to work for the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office before joining Chandler PD in 2002 and after the June 2017 crash he voluntarily relinquished his peace officer certification.
Public records show Dever was convicted out of the Gilbert Municipal Court of Extreme DUI (.20 BAC or above) based in part on the results of a court-ordered blood draw after his accident. He later served 14 days under the supervision of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.
Other public records show Dever applied with the Chandler Police Local Pension Board in December 2017 for an accidental disability pension based on a pre-June 2017 shooting as the qualifying disabling incident. The local pension board spent the next year awaiting medical opinions as to the former officer’s claims, finally approving Dever’s application in December 2018.
At least one pension board member pointed to a medial report which supported a conclusion that Dever “left his City employment because of the disabling PTSD condition.” The board’s public comments make no mention of his June 2017 DUI charge or crash while driving a city vehicle.
Sheriff Larry Dever died in September 2012 of injuries sustained while off-duty when his pickup truck rolled over on a dirt road in rural northern Arizona. He was the sole occupant of the vehicle. An autopsy report later pegged the sheriff’s BAC at .29.
In 2014, there were statewide media reports when Garrett Dever was suspended without pay for several days after he admitted accessing the Arizona Criminal Justice Information database to gather information about the man with whom his wife was having an affair.
The wife, who at the time was a Tempe police officer, later pleaded guilty to felony attempted hindering prosecution for disclosing a five-month undercover drug investigation to her lover, who she knew was the target of that investigation.