*When NYPD Sgt. Tracy Gittens tested positive for marijuana, she was fired from the security detail at Gracie Mansion and hired a lawyer to defend her claims that the department mistakenly tested a strand from her hair weave.
“I was shocked. I do not do drugs,” said Gittens as she testified at her department trial at police headquarters Friday.
“When they told me I tested positive I immediately volunteered to take another test. It was impossible for the test to be positive.”
According to N.Y. Daily News, after receiving the results of the random drug test in January 2017, Gittens paid to be independently tested. She got a urine test and a blood test at her doctor’s office. She also got a hair test a day later. All those tests came back negative for marijuana, she said.
“The (initial) test had to be wrong because I do not do drugs,” she claimed.
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Gittens was suspended for 30 days over the positive pot results. But the mother of two claims the NYPD officer who snipped her hair for testing took the sample from her human hair weave, which she wears as a ponytail.
The NYPD blasted that claim, with DNA evidence showing the tested hair was Gittens‘ own natural hair.
But on the witness stand Friday, Gittens said, “I do not do drugs.”
During her testimony, she said that when she paid to be independently retested, a nurse took a hair sample from the top of her head, not the nape of her neck as the officer at the NYPD’s Medical Services Division had done, according to the report.
“I didn’t have my hairpiece on then,” she said of the second test. “(It was) all natural.”
But an analysis later showed that the initial testing was a genetic match to her or a close relative, department prosecutors said.
“Unless a maternal relative somehow came in and switched out the samples with her own hair, there is no way this hair could be anyone’s but Sgt. Gittens,’” Department Advocate Office attorney Jeanie Moran said.
Moran said Gittens demanded that another portion of the sample be tested at a different lab — but that sample also came back positive for marijuana.
She is now facing dismissal.
A Department Trial Commissioner will determine Gittens’ guilt and make a recommendation to the commissioner who will have the final say on her future.
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