We, the People of St. Johns County have "lost confidence" in thin-skinned Sheriff DAVID SHOAR, who legally changed his name from "HOAR" in 1994, was elected Sheriff in 2004 and we hope will be out the door in 2020.
It's time for him to go.
Chris Strickland’s 2016 resignation came via sharp-worded texts to Shoar
By Jared Keever
St. Augustine Record
March 2-3, 2019
A long serving member of the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office now vying for the county’s top law enforcement post appears to have had an acrimonious break with the agency that he wants to lead.
That’s the picture painted in a nine-page document from the personnel file of Chris Strickland — a document that makes clear Strickland will be running without the endorsement of St. Johns County Sheriff David Shoar in the upcoming race for his office.
Strickland, who resigned from his post as director of the Office of the Sheriff in 2016, announced his candidacy for Sheriff in early January.
Shoar is expected to retire at the end of this, his fourth, term.
During a brief interview with The Record shortly after his announcement, Strickland said that while he chose to resign 27 years into his career, becoming Sheriff had always been a goal of his. He also said at the time that he counted Shoar as a friend, though he acknowledged “differences in philosophies” between them.
But the document, authored by Shoar and labeled a “memorandum for record” details a series of heated text messages that Strickland sent to Shoar in July 2016 that resulted in an abrupt resignation.
That memo, which was placed in Strickland’s file roughly four months after the resignation, also suggests that Shoar had lost confidence in Strickland’s effectiveness as a leader and it includes another text message, sent in October 2016, in which Strickland signaled his intent to run for office in 2020 and suggested that he still felt animosity toward Shoar.
“Don’t be mistaken, I will run for sheriff of this county in the next term because I’ve earned every crumb of it,” Strickland wrote to Shoar on Oct. 10, 2016. “I’ve earned it with every bit of my blood, sweat and tears. Again, you don’t need to respond to this. I will be there with or without your support, it means nothing to me who you support.”
That came just days after Hurricane Matthew and after Shoar had reached out to Strickland to make sure his family was prepared for the storm. The two, according to the messages included in the file, exchanged a few pleasant words before the mood again turned dark.
About three months earlier, on July 18, 2016, the two appear to have agreed to go their separate ways, with Strickland continuing to support Shoar, who at the time was running for re-election against Debra Maynard. They also agreed to say that Strickland had left simply to “pursue other interests.”
Text messages exchanged the night before though suggest that hard feelings would likely remain.
Those messages were exchanged after Strickland lashed out at the agency’s former undersheriff, Joel Bolante, after Bolante sent a one-line email to deputies wishing them well.
In that email Strickland said Bolante, who had retired more than a year earlier, “committed atrocities on the people of this sheriff’s office unparalleled to some of the most narcissistic leaders of our time.”
A subsequent exchange between Bolante and Strickland is also included in the document in which Bolante tells Strickland that the only “atrocity” he committed “was holding undeserving and incapable people such as yourself accountable.”
(In a brief phone interview on Friday, Bolante declined to talk at length about any tension between him and Strickland and offered only that he thought his own email “kind of speaks for itself” and that his job at the Sheriff’s Office was to “make sure people were doing their job and to hold those accountable who were not.”)
As the email exchange between Bolante and Strickland was taking place, Strickland also sent a copy of his initial email to Shoar via text message saying “if that cost me my job, just tell me.”
“I’m not going to apologize for what I said to him or how I feel about him,” he wrote. “It would be the same as pledging allegiance to ISIS.”
According to the document, that text was sent at 5:21 p.m. There is no response from Shoar listed.
Two hours later, Strickland sent Shoar another text attacking him for not responding.
“If you believe what Joel believes in, then f--- you and him,” he wrote. “Send Rick to come get my car and my equipment tomorrow and have Becky process my paperwork.”
More than two hours later, around 10 p.m., Shoar responded saying he had read the emails exchanged between Strickland and Bolante as well as the texts Strickland sent to him.
“Your resignation is accepted effective immediately,” Shoar wrote.
At midnight, Strickland responded, “F--- you.”
Two hours later, Strickland sent a lengthy text to Shoar apologizing for the previous message and that he knew he “can’t expect to talk to the sheriff like I did and keep a job.”
He pledged to continue to support Shoar through that year’s race for the Sheriff’s Office.
In Shoar’s memo, dated Dec. 1, 2016, he called Strickland’s first email to Bolante “outrageous and bizarre.”
Earlier in the memo, Shoar also takes issue with Strickland’s job performance as a newly appointed director and says that after Strickland missed a hurricane preparedness exercise earlier in that year he had made up his mind to demote him, though Strickland resigned before that happened.
Asked Thursday about the document in his personnel file, Strickland said he had not seen it, though he was not surprised to learn that it was there. He said a copy of it had been sent to him via certified mail but he did not pick it up because he “wasn’t interested in seeing it.”
Asked if he would like to be provided a copy so he could see if the portrayal of the exchanges was fair, he declined, and stood by anything he said.
“To be honest with you I put all that behind me,” he said. “And I can just give you a blanket statement: If it was said in there, and I said it, then it needed to be said. And that is about the best way I can describe what happened there.”
When read a synopsis of the conversation that led to his resignation, Strickland said he believed there were messages left out of the exchange (in a brief interview, Shoar said the exchange is complete), but reiterated that he stood by what he said to Shoar and said that he believes Bolante “is not a virtuous man.”
“For the record, I don’t any have regrets about what I said to him. He needed to hear it and he needed to hear it in the manner that he heard it,” he said of his conversation with Shoar.
He added later that it was important to note that all of it happened over text message “because David refused to call me and talk to me like a man.”
Strickland has put $25,000 of his own money behind his campaign and raised roughly $17,000 from others since announcing his intention to run. His financial report for the month of February has not been filed.
No other viable candidate has entered the race.
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