A 29-year-old Cedar Falls man has been charged with attempted murder in connection with a high-speed chase that ended near Charles City a week ago.
Mark Filippo has been charged in connection with the chase that ended with a trooper shooting Filippo on the morning of Friday, February 16. Trooper Mark Domino says after he chased Filippo, whose car was veering all over the road, they went through the muddy median of Highway 218 near Charles City, where the squad car got stuck. The trooper says he got out of the patrol car and ordered Filippo to get out of his SUV but instead Filippo refused to open his door and then started driving forward, toward the trooper.
Trooper Domino fired, hitting Filippo in the head. The trooper was briefly hospitalized for unspecified injuries and Filippo was treated for gunshot wounds to the head and released earlier this week. He was arrested Friday morning in Cedar Falls and taken to the Floyd County Jail.
The patrol car was equipped with a built-in video camera but it did not record the chase or the shooting. "That’s been a controversial issue," says Steve Bogle, head of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. "But really it did not impede our investigation…The trooper’s car was stuck in the center median, facing away from where the incident actually took place, so even had the tape been working, there would have been nothing on there for us, for our investigation."
The investigation concluded the video camera didn’t work because its tape was already full when this incident began. The report says the trooper fired four times as he retreated from the SUV that was heading toward him.