Ex-Met Police officer says she has obtained hate messages over dealing with of Wayne Couzens flashing instances

A former Metropolitan Police officer says she has obtained lots of of hate messages since being banned from policing over her dealing with of two incidents of flashing by Wayne Couzens.

Samantha Lee didn’t make “the correct investigative inquiries” into the offences, the place Couzens uncovered himself to feminine employees at a McDonalds restaurant in Kent in late February 2021, a disciplinary panel discovered.

The two incidents passed off simply days earlier than he kidnapped, raped and murdered Sarah Everard.

Her failure to properly investigate and the lying about her actions were found to be gross misconduct, leading to her being banned from any police power in future.

Ms Lee, 29, stated she felt like she was being “blamed completely” for Ms Everard’s dying, and that she had obtained messages from individuals saying she ought to have been the one kidnapped and murdered.

She instructed BBC Newsnight: “I think I’m seen as this horrendous, awful person that has let an absolutely heinous crime take place. And I’m being looked at as if I’m just as guilty as what Couzens is.

“But actually, there was nothing that I may have achieved that will have modified the result.

“I do not need any sympathy in any respect. All I need is individuals simply to grasp that there’s nothing that I may have achieved.

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“It has been a case of ‘let’s go in at the bottom’ rather than going up higher at the top.

“The solely person who needs to be blamed for that terrible, terrible, horrendous crime needs to be Wayne Couzens.”

The tribunal heard she had been sent to the McDonalds in Swanley on 3 March 2021, interviewing the manager Sam Taylor just hours before Couzens abducted Ms Everard from Clapham in southwest London.

Ms Lee said she believed the restaurant’s CCTV was deleted automatically, so there would be no footage of Couzens of the offence, but Mr Taylor said he had shown her the footage and told her it could be saved on a USB stick.

He also said he had told her the registration plate on Couzens’s vehicle could be seen in the CCTV footage of the second incident.

Ms Lee stated after the ruling that she had been made a “scapegoat”, including: “I am a young female PC and I am the only person who has faced any disciplinary action in relation to this.

“There is just one one that is answerable for all the things that occurred and that’s Wayne Couzens.

“I have never lied.”

Couzens was sentenced in March this year to 19 months in prison over three counts of indecent exposure – the 2 at McDonalds and one the place he uncovered himself to a feminine bike owner in Kent in November 2020.

When he was sentenced he was already serving life behind bars for what he did to Ms Everard.