BALTIMORE -- The WBAL TV 11 News I-Team has learned that two veteran Baltimore city homicide detectives are facing an internal investigation after allegedly refusing to cooperate in attempts to evict a public housing tenant.

I-Team lead investigative reporter Jayne Miller said the public housing tenant is related to a man who tried to kill a police officer.

In March 2006, city police Officer Dante Hemingway was shot and wounded in the Westport Housing Complex. Police said he was ambushed while on his way to meet a female acquaintance.

Jobrea Lodge was arrested, charged and convicted of the crime. At the time of his arrest, he gave his grandmother's address as his own, according to police. She lives in one of the public housing units in the same Westport complex.

Maryland Public Housing rules state if the tenant or anyone living with the tenant is involved in criminal activity, the tenant can be evicted.

Three months after Lodge was arrested, his grandmother was served with an eviction notice, Miller reported. The Housing Authority claimed she had violated her lease by harboring a criminal.

But when the case went to court Tuesday, two of the homicide detectives involved in the shooting investigation refused to cooperate in the eviction attempt.

"These detectives felt very strongly," said Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police President Bob Cherry.

He said the detectives did not believe the woman had anything to do with her grandson's crime.

"A lot of these defendants and thugs out here, they'll use a number of their relatives' addresses just because they don't have a house of their own and they want to keep police thinking about where they're living. Our investigators recognized that as the case here, and they didn't want to proceed with assisting the state in removing this 78-year-old woman right before Christmas from a house she's lived in for 17 years," Cherry said.

The case against the grandmother was settled and she won't be evicted, Miller reported. She will be moved to another unit.

The two detectives currently face an internal investigation -- the result of a lengthy e-mail sent to the police commissioner by the housing prosecutor in the eviction case, Miller reported.

"These two detectives -- veteran homicide investigators -- they did what was morally right," Cherry said.

The police department confirmed the internal investigation. A spokesperson for the department noted it has to investigate when concerns like that are raised.