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Firefighter's Widow Accuses Arizona PD Of Cover Up

Ericka Whitaker Tells Her Story Exclusively To CBS 11 News

NORTH TEXAS (CBS 11 News) ― The widow of murdered Dallas firefighter Charles Whitaker is talking publicly for the first time about her husband's death.

Ericka Whitaker told her story exclusively to CBS 11 News.

The death of her husband is still an open emotional wound. "I had just spoken to him at the end of the game," she said.

After that final phone call, Whitaker and fellow Dallas firefighter Reginald Cuington were shot in a drive-by. They had just left the suburban Phoenix bar where they had watched the Super Bowl.

Cuington would eventually survive the attack.

But Whitaker only had a few hours with her 38-year-old husband before he was taken off life support.

"He was able to move his head, because he could hear our voice, but he wasn't able to talk," she said.

The 36-year-old widow said she needs to defend her husband before he can be laid to rest.

She said her husband's memory, while honored at his fire station, is being tarnished by a rush to judgment about how he died.

"Charles was a very loving husband, family man and was a loyal employee of the City of Dallas," she said.

But Whitaker believes that loyalty was not returned by those who want to connect his murder to the seizure of some football jerseys the firefighter was selling two days before he was killed.

"They were replica jerseys, but they were not counterfeit," she said. "Had they been counterfeit, he would have been arrested at the time they were confiscated."

Whitaker said her husband made extra money buying and selling the replicas jerseys. She insists the jersey enterprise had nothing to do with his death.

"That stuff happened two days before the murder even occurred," she said.

The widow accuses the police department of looking for an easy explanation of the murder to avoid the bad publicity of random violence during Super Bowl weekend.

"To deter negative publicity from the city, they're coming up with all the things that happened while they were down there," she said.

Charles' mother is also upset that her son's honor was being questioned soon after they were handed the flag that draped his casket.

"We hadn't even made it back home, and all this negative stuff started," Whitaker said. "It just made it worse."

No one with the Peoria Police Department, which is investigating the case, immediately returned calls concerning this story.

"The true story will come out," said Charles' mother.

Whitaker's funeral will be sometime later this week. Cuington arrived back in Dallas Monday night after being released from an Arizona hospital.

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