During the latter months of 2022, 28-year-old Austin Lee Edwards, then a Virginia State Police officer posing as a 17-year-old boy in an online relationship, sent jewelry and gift cards to a teenage Riverside girl and paid for her grocery and fast-food deliveries.
They exchanged voice recordings and text messages through Instagram and Discord as the 15-year-old member of the Winek family kept those activities a secret from her parents.
The teen eventually broke off the relationship when shortly after Halloween, Edwards pushed for her to send photos of herself naked. Edwards responded to the breakup and being blocked on Instagram with an emailed threat of suicide.
What happened next became the basis for a new lawsuit filed on Feb. 2, 2024, by an attorney for the girl whose grandparents, Mark and Sharon Winek, and mother Brooke, were slain by Edwards on Nov. 25, 2022, after he drove cross-country to their Price Court home with a plan to eliminate anyone in the way of his plot to kidnap the teen and drive her to Virginia.
Authorities said Edwards killed himself hours later as police cornered him in the Mojave Desert. The teen escaped, physically unharmed.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Virginia, names Washington County Sheriff Blake Andis, Detective William Smarr and Edwards’ estate as defendants
This is the second lawsuit filed against Washington County in this case. The first, by Mychelle Blandin, sister of Brooke Winek, seeks unspecified damages. Washington County said in its response filed in U.S. District Court in California that it is not liable for Edwards’ actions because “they were not taken within the scope of his employment.”
The new lawsuit seeks $50 million in damages and alleges how “deliberate indifference” in the Sheriff’s Office background check of Edwards after he resigned from the Virginia State Police a month before the killings allowed him to gain access to the Winek home by using his sheriff’s-issued badge and gun. The suit also provides fresh insights into Edwards’ relationship with the teen and new but still unconfirmed details on how the Wineks were killed.
“Without that service weapon and that badge, he is unlikely to be able to get in that house,” attorney Scott Perry of Virginia Beach, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the teen and the estate of Brooke Winek, said in an interview. “If they had done their work and found out about his background, this never would have happened.”
The lawsuit says Andis and Smarr compounded mistakes made by the Virginia State Police, which admitted it blew the background check during the hiring process in January 2022 by failing to uncover a 2016 incident in which Edwards attacked his father and was placed on a mental health detention that cost him his right to own and carry a gun.
Andis did not immediately respond to two voicemails seeking comment on the lawsuit. Smarr declined to comment.
The Virginia State Police are not named as defendants in this lawsuit. Perry said that’s because, among other reasons, Washington County was Edwards’ most recent employer.
Edwards quickly became known as the “Catfishing cop.” Catfishing is a term for luring a person into a relationship by establishing a fictional persona. That’s how the teen met Edwards in the summer of 2022.
Edwards said in the application to the Sheriff’s Department obtained by Southern California News Group from that agency that he left the Virginia State Police because he wanted to work closer to his home in Richmond.
Edwards listed three references, including his father — the man a police report said he had bitten during a violent struggle. But Smarr never contacted the father, the lawsuit says, and gave up after initially being unable to reach the other two. Smarr also did not follow up when he found none of Edwards’ neighbors at home, according to the lawsuit.
Also, the lawsuit says, the sheriff ignored a lack of response on the application to a number of questions, including whether Edwards’ permit to carry a gun had ever been revoked and whether he had ever been the subject of a civil restraining order, protection order or contact order. The answer spaces in the SCNG copy of the application were blank.
“If the VSP or the WCSO had performed a background check on Edwards, neither of them would have hired Edwards,” the lawsuit asserts.
Instead, Edwards began training to be a sheriff’s patrol deputy on Nov. 16, 2022. Seven days later, Edwards traveled west.
Around 8:30 a.m. on Nov. 25, the lawsuit says, Brooke Winek, her daughter the teen and a second daughter were planning to go shopping with Winek’s boyfriend. But Sharon called and said she needed to talk with Brooke about “something very serious.” After hanging up, Brooke collected her daughters’ cell phones, saying there was a problem with them that needed to be resolved at home.
Then at about 9:40 a.m., Sharon called Brooke’s sister Mychelle to say, in hushed tones, that there was a detective at the Winek home asking about the teen’s supposed exchange of “lewd” photographs. Suddenly that “detective,” who was actually Edwards, grabbed the phone from Sharon and told Mychelle that Sharon was “just distraught.”
Brooke then went to the Winek home along with the teen and told her to wait in the car.
The teen eventually entered the house. As she opened the door, a man who she did not recognize grabbed her by the hair. Then she recognized Edwards’ voice.
She was greeted by a horrifying scene: Sharon was in the entryway, Mark was beyond Sharon near the stairs and Brooke was on the hardwood floor, all lying face down with bags over their heads that were taped at the neck. Their arms and legs were bound by duct tape and they were apparently dead. (Riverside police have said the victims were not shot but have not confirmed the manner or cause of death).
The teen screamed.
Edwards dragged her around the house as he used canisters of gas to set fires. He opened the doors and windows to make sure the flames had enough oxygen, the lawsuit says. Edwards then forced her into the back of his car.
“He told (the teen) to pretend she was his daughter if anyone asked, that he was going to take her back to Virginia now that she has nothing in California, and he had to kill her family so he would be able to take her,” the lawsuit says.
The plan was to drive through Las Vegas, New Mexico and Texas. Edwards had a blood-stained knife in his car, and at one point he stopped to change his bloody clothes, the lawsuit says.
But a neighbor on Price Court had seen Edwards’ car, which was parked in a driveway and appeared out of place, and called police. Detectives quickly found a police report Edwards had previously filed after his car was vandalized and used the listed phone number to ping his location. San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies found him in the Mojave Desert, where he engaged in a gun battle with them before turning his service weapon on himself.
But before Edwards died, he commented to the teen about the law enforcement agencies that hired him, according to the lawsuit:
“They need to do better backgrounds,” Edwards said.
