Robert Lee Cooke talks from jail

Just inside the double-locked doors, past the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail’s lobby, the air is stuffy and hot. Inmates in orange jumpsuits line a narrow, tiled hallway—talking, joking, dragging their feet. Robert Lee Cooke, the man convicted of killing an Albemarle County police dog in October, 2004, while fleeing a burglary, is dressed in a striped jumpsuit. He maneuvers his shiny red wheelchair into a low-ceilinged office to be interviewed. Cooke was paralyzed from the waist down when Officer Andy Gluba shot him twice during a breaking-and-entering call nearly two years ago.
    Cooke has written two letters to C-VILLE Weekly over the past month. Among other things, he wants the public to know he’s not a dog killer.
    “I’m not the bad person they read or heard about,” he wrote on July 13.
Leaning forward, Cooke recounts the night he tried to rob a Reservoir Road home. Cooke maintains he didn’t bring the gun with him, he found it in the home, and he never shot at Gluba.
    “[Gluba] asked me, ‘Why did you shoot my dog?’ And I said, ‘I didn’t.’ He said, ‘Yes, you did,’ and that’s when the second shot was fired,” Cooke says.
    “I didn’t even know the dog was hit,” he insists. In the gunfire, Cooke maintains that either he or Gluba could have shot the K-9.
    “Why didn’t [Gluba] follow the rules and regulations?… I apologized—he could’ve at least stood up and said, ‘I wish this hadn’t happened.’”
    His trial, Cooke says, was “like a written play.” He feels the facts of his case were obscured by public outcry against the “police-dog killer.” Albemarle Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Camblos, he says, kept pushing for a higher and higher sentence. “Why do you need 20 witnesses? His whole side was like a put-in with the jury,” Cooke says.
    Cooke feels his sentence—seven years for shooting the police dog and three for the weapons charge—is unfair. He’s tormented by the Andrew Alston case, in which a former UVA student served less than three years for a fatal stabbing incident. “Ten years for a dog, three years for him, there’s not any right in the justice,” Cooke says.
    Cooke was first incarcerated when he was 18, on robbery and drug charges. After serving nine years, he was released in 2000. Then, he says, “I was working, doing what I was supposed to be doing.”
    The decision to return to crime in 2004 wasn’t entirely his own, Cooke insinuates. “On the streets, somebody asks you for something…you be a friend,” he says.
    Cooke has been at the regional jail for four months, and he is locked in his cell 24 hours a day. The TV is too far away for him to watch, he claims, but he reads newspapers, including C-VILLE, when they’re available. He gets two 30-minute visits per month—usually with his pregnant wife, and mother.
    When asked how his 6-year-old daughter is doing, Cooke breaks eye contact, turns his head to the side, and says that she’s very smart—she’ll be in first grade soon.
    Cooke is awaiting transfer to a penitentiary, which he hopes will have better medical care. When he was out on bond, undergoing physical therapy, “I was getting to the point where I could stand,” he says. But his treatment’s been on hold, since the regional jail doesn’t have a rehabilitation facility.
    Cooke also looks forward to gaining access to a law library, so he can appeal his case. He’ll continue to follow media reports and get an attorney who specializes in appeals, he says. Before wheeling himself into the muggy hallway back to his cell, he says, “I just can’t accept 10 years.”