As Kurt Vonnegut would say, "Busy, busy, busy."
Come speak out on Sheriff SHOAR's secretive, bloated FY 2018 budget at the County Administration Building Taj Mahal at 9 AM on Tuesday, June 20, 2017. It's our boat. Let's rock it. Justice for Michelle O'Connell
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/17/us/michelle-oconnell-jeremy-banks.html?_r=0
Print headline, page one, above the fold, with four (4) inside pages, including centerfold ("double truck" to journalism majors):
"The Sheriff's War: He called it a suicide. Then an investigator raised doubts -- and became the investigated."
Online headline:
"A Mother’s Death, a Botched Inquiry and a Sheriff at War -- The sheriff called it a suicide. When a state investigator raised questions, he became the investigated.
By WALT BOGDANICH
JUNE 17, 2017 online
Sunday, JUNE 18, 2017
The New York Times
Rusty Rodgers, a special agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. His review of a closed case would upend his life. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times
ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — Rusty Rodgers did not fit everyone’s image of a law enforcement officer, particularly in deeply conservative northeast Florida. One police chief, well ensconced in the local power structure, expressed irritation over what he called the officer’s “Jimmy Buffett look” — long hair, beard, loafers and no socks.
No one, however, questioned Agent Rodgers’s tenacity as an investigator.
Working for the Jacksonville sheriff, he doggedly pursued a rapist who preyed on poor women and prostitutes. “They deserve justice just as much as someone who lives on the Southside,” he told the local paper, referring to the wealthier part of town. The rapist got 45 years.
Later, Agent Rodgers joined the state’s elite investigative unit, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, where he quickly earned agent-of-the-year honors — and a meeting with the governor — for helping dismantle a terrorist financing network that stretched from Florida to the Middle East. For the governor, he made a concession: He cut his hair.
Then, in January 2011, came the call that would upend his life.
Go to St. Augustine, he was told, to reinvestigate the death of 24-year-old Michelle O’Connell, shot while packing to leave her deputy sheriff boyfriend, Jeremy Banks. The fatal bullet came from his service weapon.
Agent Rodgers had been summoned here twice before to answer questions about cases involving the St. Johns County sheriff, David B. Shoar — examining whether his officers had drawn their guns and used pepper spray to break up a peaceful graduation party in an African-American neighborhood (they had), and whether a political supporter of the sheriff had engaged in improper conduct with minors (he hadn’t).
A Return to St. Augustine
Four years ago, The New York Times went to St. Augustine, Fla., to report on the recently closed investigation into the mysterious death of Michelle O'Connell. The story, it turns out, was far from over.
This time, the stakes were higher. There was a dead body — a single mother of a 4-year-old girl — and the sheriff’s office had chosen to investigate its own deputy, poorly as it turned out. Because detectives quickly concluded that Ms. O’Connell had taken her own life, they had done little investigating.
Now, with crucial evidence missing or unexamined, Agent Rodgers had to make sense of the mess. And that meant possibly antagonizing one of Florida’s most powerful sheriffs. A mercurial leader, unctuous one moment, bitingly critical the next, Sheriff Shoar didn’t countenance challenges to his authority. He had resisted the O’Connell family’s demands for an outside review of the case for nearly five months.
When the sheriff finally agreed, his office had one requirement — that Agent Rodgers, and only Agent Rodgers, conduct the investigation, according to Steve Donaway, a former supervisor with the state investigative agency. (The sheriff disputes that.)
It took the agent only two weeks to find evidence that fundamentally changed the complexion of the case. Two neighbors told him that they had heard cries for help on the night of the shooting, prompting the medical examiner to change his ruling from suicide to “shot by another.” As the investigation moved toward homicide, the local state attorney suddenly recused himself, prompting the governor to appoint a special prosecutor.
But the medical examiner changed his mind yet again, and the special prosecutor, citing insufficient evidence, closed the case without bringing charges. And for a year, that’s where the case stood — closed if not forgotten.
Then, in 2013, I flew to St. Augustine and asked the sheriff for files related to the shooting. I came to write about the O’Connell case as part of an examination, in collaboration with the PBS public affairs program “Frontline,” of how the police investigate domestic violence allegations in their ranks.
My record request was routine, but Sheriff Shoar didn’t view it that way. In his world, an out-of-town reporter “poking around” a closed case “kind of stunk,” he said, and he alerted prosecutors so they wouldn’t be caught off guard. But when the sheriff learned that I had already asked Agent Rodgers’s supervisor for an interview, and that he had not been notified, the sheriff erupted, suspecting, incorrectly, that the agency was behind my visit.
“I realized I’m dealing with a whole different set of facts, quite truthfully malice and wickedness,” he told state officials. “I’ve been in this business for 33 years. I know how to deal with bullies.”
His answer was a scathingly personal yearslong attack on Agent Rodgers — a campaign that put the outsize powers of a small-town sheriff on full display and ultimately swept up nearly everyone in its path.
The sheriff commissioned his own investigation of the investigator, accusing him of serious crimes that, he said, had nearly caused an innocent man — his officer — to be charged with murder. He embedded his accusations in the public consciousness through a cascade of press releases, phone calls, letters, interviews and online posts. He sent his findings to state law enforcement officials and the F.B.I. As a result, Agent Rodgers’s own employer and later a special prosecutor began investigating him. He was placed on administrative leave, forced to surrender his badge and gun, barred by his agency from publicly defending himself.
In April, I returned to St. Augustine to report on this second act of a drama that, over seven years now, has sown deep scars in this community by the sea. It has divided the law enforcement establishment, not to mention the family of Michelle O’Connell. It has been reviewed by one state attorney, three special prosecutors and four medical examiners, and is debated still in the local press, on the beaches and in the bars. It has, in short, become the stuff of Florida noir, featured in a documentary on Netflix, in People magazine and on television shows like “Dr. Phil.” “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Dr. Frederick Hobin, who performed the original autopsy.
On this trip, I approached several of the central players who had declined to be interviewed before. I had new questions, based on my review of thousands of documents not available when I first reported on the case.
Sheriff Shoar had promised to spend the rest of his career holding Agent Rodgers accountable. But what I came to learn was that the sheriff had tried to destroy the investigator with accusations that were often nothing more than innuendo and unverified rumors. Even so, they went virtually unchallenged for years.
In the end, the sheriff did not achieve his goal of seeing Agent Rodgers sent to prison, charged with a crime or even fired from his job. But he did accomplish something else: He diverted attention away from his office’s own botched investigation, the spawning ground for so much of the anger and conflict that followed.
SEAT OF POWER
It is an hour’s drive down Interstate 95 from the Jacksonville airport to St. Augustine, which promotes itself as America’s oldest city, where Ponce de León mythically searched for the Fountain of Youth.
St. Augustine forms the core of a very red county that in 2016 voted overwhelmingly for Donald J. Trump and for Sheriff Shoar, re-electing him to a fourth term with 85 percent of the vote.
The sheriff’s persona plays well on this political stage. Speaking to a Christian prayer group in 2015, he railed against gun control, separation of church and state and especially Washington. America’s problems began, he said, when the government “tried to outlaw our faith.” He blamed the media for “burning down Ferguson” and spreading the “false narrative” that police officers are bad people who must be watched with body cameras. Along the way, he sprinkled in a little Shakespeare on the brevity of life.
Sheriff Shoar, who declined to speak for this article, draws support from an important Florida constituency: law enforcement and the military. He is a former member of the Florida National Guard and a past president of the Florida Sheriffs Association, where he recently welcomed his newly elected brethren with an ethics lecture titled “Keeping the Tarnish Off the Badge.”
The state enforcement agency, known locally as F.D.L.E., “has always bent over backwards for sheriffs,” said Mr. Donaway, who supervised Agent Rodgers and his investigative colleagues in 13 counties. “The sheriffs association is politically very powerful.”
Sheriff Shoar began his rise to power as a patrolman for the St. Augustine police, eventually becoming chief. His personnel file from that era includes extensive praise, but also a hint of problems.
“One area he could improve is to slow down and get all the facts prior to making decisions,” his supervisor wrote in October 1999. In an earlier personnel review, the supervisor had written that “too many projects at once cause a loss of focus.”
The sheriff does not suffer from a lack of self-regard. He once told law enforcement officers that they might want an “8-by-10 photograph” of him after reading his “beautiful” letter to The New York Times — he copied 31 public figures and members of the media — saying the paper’s reporting on the shooting lacked objectivity. The Times was still eight months away from publishing its first article on the case.
His power is nourished by his gift for extemporaneous, often humorous, oratory, not to mention his position as one of the county’s largest employers. He has the means to reward people he favors. One month after his agency’s flawed investigation of the O’Connell shooting, he surprised employees by handing out $1,000 bonuses. He later promoted the officers who investigated Agent Rodgers — “my brightest guys,” he called them.
And he hired as a deputy the 20-year-old son of the special prosecutor who had declined to charge Deputy Banks. The prosecutor, Brad King, listed the sheriff as his first character reference in an unsuccessful attempt last year to join the Florida Supreme Court. (Mr. King said that he did not know the sheriff during the O’Connell case and that his son was highly qualified for the job.)
“He really fancies himself as a kingmaker,” said Michael Gold, the sheriff’s first campaign manager, who broke with him years ago and publishes an online news report. After he criticized the handling of the O’Connell case, Mr. Gold said, the sheriff refused to renew his press credentials. He was never given a reason.
“He demands absolute authority and does not like to be questioned by anyone,” Mr. Gold said.
Nancy Shaver, a political neophyte who unseated a Shoar supporter as mayor of St. Augustine in 2014, wrote a letter to the local paper asking the United States attorney to review the O’Connell case. When she ran for re-election two years later, Sheriff Shoar backed her opponent, the owner of a conservative radio station. “It’s more important than ever,” the sheriff proclaimed, “to have elected leaders who stand with our police officers.”
Ms. Shaver said it was the first time the sheriff had injected himself into the nonpartisan mayoral race. She won anyhow.
A COMPLEX CRIME SCENE
At 11:20 on the night of Sept. 2, 2010, Deputy Banks called 911 to report that his girlfriend had shot herself: “I’m Deputy Banks with the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office. I work with y’all. Get someone here now.” The sheriff’s officers found him holding Ms. O’Connell as she lay on the floor with a gunshot to the mouth.
According to the deputy, Ms. O’Connell was packing to move out after breaking up with him when he heard a shot while he was sitting in the garage. He rushed to another part of the house, he said, smashed through a locked door and found her on the ground.
Two inexperienced detectives hastily decided that Ms. O’Connell had taken her own life, even though the crime scene offered a muddled picture. How could a woman unfamiliar with guns withdraw her boyfriend’s weapon from a retention holster? Why was a second bullet buried in the carpet several inches from her body? Why did she have a bleeding cut above her eye?
After months of questions and complaints from the O’Connell family, Agent Rodgers was dispatched to re-examine the shooting.
The investigator, now 60, has never shied from difficult assignments.
“There are two types of people in law enforcement,” Mr. Donaway, the former F.D.L.E. supervisor, said in an interview. “For one group, it’s a job — good people — but it’s their job. They feed their family and look at retirement.” Agent Rodgers, he said, was in a different class — officers who, “when they see evil, and the bad things that happen to people,” are driven to do something about it. He had investigated cold-case killings, child pornography, police shootings and an officer suspected of serial rapes.
What made this case especially delicate was that Ms. O’Connell’s brother and mother worked for the sheriff, while Agent Rodgers’s immediate superior was married to a senior official in the sheriff’s office.
The agent’s first task was easy — identify holes in the sheriff’s investigation. He gave his findings to the sheriff’s second-in-command, Joel Bolante, who considered him a friend from when they worked a vice case years before. “I didn’t have any problems with Rusty,” he said. “I knew he was pretty thorough with that kind of work.”
With no witnesses or suicide note in hand, Sheriff Shoar’s officers should have interviewed Ms. O’Connell’s family to assess her mental state, but did not. They also failed to canvass the neighborhood, send evidence to the lab, download cellphone data, collect all relevant clothing and properly interview the boyfriend. “Evidence that could have been collected, to either prove or disprove what happened that night, had been lost forever because of their incompetence,” Mr. Donaway said. Unfairly or not, suspicion fell on Deputy Banks. And the O’Connell family lost the chance to achieve closure.
Then, two weeks in, Agent Rodgers made his surprise discovery — the two neighbors who said they had heard screams for help before each gunshot. Still, many questions remained unresolved, and on the advice of the state attorney, the agent hired a respected crime scene reconstructionist, Jerry Findley. In April 2011, Mr. Findley rendered his conclusion: The evidence was more consistent with homicide than with suicide.
If Mr. Findley’s findings did not sway the medical examiner, Dr. Hobin, the neighbors’ testimony did. In June, he changed his finding from suicide to “shot by another.”
Soon after, another influential figure joined the discussion — a newly appointed medical examiner, Dr. Predrag Bulic. Although the O’Connell case was not his, Dr. Bulic assumed control. He produced no report but concluded that Ms. O’Connell had taken her own life. Eventually, Dr. Hobin came to agree.
Both cited the lack of defensive wounds, though there was a new injury above Ms. O’Connell’s eye. Dr. Bulic theorized that she had turned the gun upside down and shot herself, causing the outer edge of the gun’s tactical light to cut her skin as it was fired.
Later, the special prosecutor would latch on to Dr. Bulic’s theory, saying the light recoiled “forward” rather than backward, causing the injury. Forensic experts I interviewed dismissed that as ludicrous.
Dr. Bulic had also incorrectly measured the gun — by a lot — rendering his explanation even more implausible.
Using an unloaded gun, Dr. Bulic demonstrated his theory at a meeting called by the state attorney. Mr. Donaway, one of several F.D.L.E. agents in attendance, recalled that, before sitting down, Dr. Bulic said words to the effect that “I had a number of meetings with Sheriff Shoar about this case, but I want you to know it did not influence my decision.”
The agents were stunned. The meeting went downhill from there, F.D.L.E. records show. Mark Brutnell, Agent Rodgers’s immediate supervisor, said that as law enforcement officials “kept firing questions,” Dr. Bulic repeatedly changed his account of how Ms. O’Connell had held the gun.
The medical examiner, who denies discussing the case with Sheriff Shoar, gave them another reason to worry. “After he’s fumbling and bumbling, he makes the statement, ‘And I can rule undetermined if you want,’” said Dominick Pape, who ran the agency’s Jacksonville office. At that meeting, he said, he became convinced that Dr. Bulic “did not have a clue how she could have committed suicide with that weapon.”
At one point, prosecutors considered exhuming Ms. O’Connell’s body. But “Bulic did a cursory review of what Hobin did, and he said there is no need to pull the body out of the ground,” Agent Brutnell recalled. “That is a game-changer. It stopped the investigation.”
The state attorney, R. J. Larizza, suddenly recused himself, citing his friendship with the sheriff. He refused to elaborate when I asked why that had not been a concern from the outset.
With the case now in the lap of the special prosecutor, Mr. King, yet another medical examiner was called in — Dr. Steven Cogswell. He endorsed the upside-down gun theory, though he produced no report and could not remember details when I interviewed him in 2013.
Mr. King also discounted Mr. Findley’s conclusion of homicide, saying the analyst admitted that he had not considered the upside-down gun theory.
Mr. Findley disputes that claim. It was considered, he said, but quickly rejected as implausible.
On March 12, 2012, Mr. King announced his decision, explaining in a memorandum that the evidence cited by F.D.L.E., pointing toward homicide, had “equally innocent explanations.”
His conclusion: “The facts as they currently exist do not support the prosecution of Jeremy Banks for any homicide offense.”
THE ATTACK BEGINS
That was where the case stood a year later when I made my first trip to St. Augustine, to report on the shooting and its impact on the community. Sheriff Shoar would later cite that visit as the reason he ordered his officers to re-examine a closed case.
An F.D.L.E. supervisor, he said, told the sheriff’s office that I had interviewed him about the shooting for 30 to 40 minutes. On hearing this, I immediately informed the sheriff that he was mistaken, that the supervisor had in fact refused to answer any of my questions. Even so, Sheriff Shoar repeated his statement in his report.
For an interview that never happened, it had quite an impact.
In a little more than a month, the sheriff responded with a blistering 152-page report that all but declared war on the state’s investigative agency. The sheriff accused Agent Rodgers of manufacturing evidence, coaching witnesses and lying to obtain search warrants, among other misdeeds. He also harshly condemned Mr. Pape, the special agent in charge, or S.A.C., in Jacksonville, where Agent Rodgers worked.
“Though I and many others suspected that Agent Rodgers and SAC Pape were careless and reckless during their review/investigation of this case, it was not until we conducted this exhaustive review did we come to understand the gravity of their misconduct,” Sheriff Shoar wrote.
The officer who led the sheriff’s investigation, Skip Cole, now a commander, confirmed that his team started reviewing Agent Rodgers’s files after learning of my interest in the case. “We tried to get out in front of it,” he said in court papers.
Sheriff Shoar acknowledged alerting the medical examiner, Dr. Bulic, of possible trouble ahead. F.D.L.E.’s supervisors, he told him, “are dirty dealing, and this guy from The New York Times ain’t no good either.”
One thing Sheriff Shoar’s officers did not do was try to interview their target, Agent Rodgers. Later on, however, they would share information with the special prosecutor investigating him.
All the while, F.D.L.E. prohibited the agent from responding, even as Sheriff Shoar continued to publicly roast his reputation. (Agent Rodgers was also barred from speaking for this article.)
But the documents I recently located and reviewed — thousands of pages of investigative files, court records, letters, emails and audiotapes from the inquiries into Agent Rodgers and from a lawsuit filed by Deputy Banks — when taken together, offer a radical counterpoint to the sheriff’s portrait of an ethically corrupt investigator.
Agent Rodgers’s work was notflawless. While certain facts remain in dispute, this much is clear: The most damaging accusations against him turned out to be demonstrably false, unsupported by existing evidence or contradicted by Sheriff Shoar’s own sources. Lesser criticisms were either overblown or deemed mostly within the bounds of accepted investigative practices.
What’s more, records show that the sheriff and his officers made little or no effort to confirm their accusations, which were simply passed on to government agencies in hopes of provoking a criminal investigation.
The misstatements begin in the opening of the report, where Sheriff Shoar erroneously contends that Mr. King, the special prosecutor, concluded that Ms. O’Connell killed herself. He made no ruling about how she died.
Some false statements are repeated. Sheriff Shoar twice accuses the agent of lying to obtain a search warrant by telling the court that Deputy Banks had failed to mention that a third person was present during the shooting.
“This is a deliberate misrepresentation of the truth,” the sheriff wrote, alleging that Agent Rodgers knew the person had not been present but made the statement “in an attempt to portray his perception of Banks’s guilt and to mislead the court.” In fact, it was only after warrants were issued that Agent Rodgers learned that the third person had not been present after all, according to F.D.L.E.’s internal affairs investigators.
The report portrayed him as a rogue agent whose investigative style, and supposed early belief in Deputy Banks’s guilt, troubled other investigators. Agent Rodgers’s employer did not publicly challenge this, but privately his supervisors did.
“If somebody came up and said your investigators are doing it wrong, that would be a huge red flag,” Mr. Donaway said. But that never happened, he said.
Agent Rodgers’s supervisors said his work was closely monitored. “It wasn’t because we didn’t trust Rusty,” Mr. Donaway said. “We trusted him explicitly. But we wanted to make sure that we ran it through many minds and made collective decisions.” Everyone, he said, knew it was “a hot-potato case.”
Only after The Times began examining the shooting, more than two years after Ms. O’Connell died, did Sheriff Shoar list many, but not all, of his own agency’s mistakes on just two pages buried in the middle of his 152-page attack.
A PIVOTAL MOMENT
Perhaps the biggest challenge Sheriff Shoar faced in seeking to discredit Agent Rodgers was his discovery of the two neighbors who said they had heard a woman scream for help.
Their statements appeared to undercut Deputy Banks’s account that he and Ms. O’Connell had not argued at the house the night she died. As one F.D.L.E. supervisor wryly observed, “A lot of suicide people don’t scream for help before they shoot themselves.”
Still, state investigators were initially skeptical. Investigators from the state attorney and the special prosecutor separately visited the neighbors — Heather Ladley and Stacey Boswell — and found them credible. Both passed polygraph exams.
Sheriff Shoar’s reaction to the new disclosure would become the template for his response to anyone who disagreed with his view of the case — he attacked.
“I know what happened,” he told F.D.L.E. agents investigating Agent Rodgers. Without offering proof, or even interviewing the neighbors, he said the two women were “bogus” and knew nothing. “Rodgers, I think, interviewed them all at the same time, and I’m sure he coached them.”
He also accused Agent Rodgers of trying to hide how he had found them, yet the investigator explained that in his written report. Both women said under oath that they had been interviewed separately, and that the agent had not coached them.
As for the polygraph exams, the sheriff had an answer for that, too: Although the polygraph examiner was “pretty damn good,” he said, Agent Rodgers “either strong-armed him or conned him into it because I’ve had experts look at the polygraph and it’s nonsense.” The sheriff did not interview the examiner before making that accusation.
Sheriff Shoar had one more line of attack. The women, he wrote, underlined and in boldface, admitted that they frequently smoked marijuana and couldn’t remember if they had done so on the night of the shooting.
But Sheriff Shoar’s supposed source of that information, Robert Hardwick, then an investigator for the state attorney, has denied telling the sheriff that, and the women have denied telling him.
In preparing my original article, I sent the sheriff written questions, among them why he hadn’t publicly corrected the record about drug use. “Whether it is true or not is immaterial,” he replied, though he eventually removed the statement from his online post.
Deputy Banks’s lawyer, Robert L. McLeod, tried a different approach. He hired a former Jacksonville deputy sheriff to run a sound test with an actress imitating Ms. O’Connell screaming for help. “The sound was inaudible at the distant recording location,” he concluded.
Apart from running a test that involved a different woman at a different time of day, the former deputy, Michael A. Knox, had been criticized last year by the Forensic Science Commission in Texas for concluding, based on a surveillance video, that an armed robber was much taller than witnesses had said. That finding prompted the Innocence Project of Texas to accuse him of using “junk science,” court records show. Mr. Knox defended his work, but has revised his height estimate downward.
Sheriff Shoar also attacked Mr. Findley, the crime scene reconstructionist who had disagreed with his conclusions about the O’Connell case. “Because of Agent Rodgers’s conduct, the Findley report is meaningless and wrong,” the sheriff wrote. “It is apparent that Findley did not view all of the evidence.”
How he reached that conclusion is unclear, because he never asked Mr. Findley what he had reviewed. Nor did his officers.
Commander Cole, who led the sheriff’s review of Agent Rodgers’s work, would be asked about that later at a hearing by the agent’s lawyer, Chelsea Winicki.
“So if he wasn’t provided all of the evidence, what was he not provided?” she asked.
“I can’t answer that.”
Ms. Winicki pressed for an answer. “At no point did you contact Findley to clarify what evidence he was provided?”
“I did not.”
“Did anybody on your team?”
“No.”
Commander Cole said logic dictated that if Mr. Findley had reviewed all the evidence, he would have agreed with the sheriff. “So that’s my opinion, I guess.”
A WEEKEND MEETING
Soon, Sheriff Shoar would get what he wanted. Agent Rodgers’s employer began investigating him, and the governor appointed a special prosecutor. Deputy Banks, who has denied harming his girlfriend, sued the agent, accusing him of violating his civil rights.
The sheriff used his public office to promote his deputy’s private lawsuit, posting on his agency website not only the legal complaint, but also Deputy Banks’s notice of his intent to sue and other related court filings, which closely tracked the allegations in the sheriff’s report. Agent Rodgers’s legal responses are not displayed.
A central plank in Sheriff Shoar’s campaign was the allegation that the agent had lied to obtain search warrants.
In late 2013 or early 2014, the county judge who had approved the warrants received an unusual request. It was the sheriff, asking to meet him — a potential witness in Deputy Banks’s lawsuit — over the weekend at a Starbucks so he could hand-deliver some documents. The sheriff wanted the judge to read his accusation that the agent had lied.
In court papers, the judge, Charles Tinlin, recounted that the sheriff, who had never before contacted him about a case, wanted “to deliver a package to me.” Asked if the meeting was “off the books,” Judge Tinlin replied: “You’ll have to ask him that. It wasn’t on my books.” Sheriff Shoar acknowledged that the judge was a potential witness, yet he followed up by sending an officer to deliver his full investigative binder.
The sheriff told F.D.L.E. investigators that Judge Tinlin “vividly” remembered Agent Rodgers because he was so “animated and forceful” in seeking the warrants and in suggesting that the sheriff’s office was involved in a “cover-up” involving Ms. O’Connell’s death.
“Can you imagine saying that to a sitting judge?” the sheriff told investigators. “Can you imagine the arrogance of that?”
But Judge Tinlin disputes that account. “I don’t remember Agent Rodgers ever using the word ‘cover-up,’” he said. In fact, the judge added, “I’m the one that asked him about a cover-up.”
The judge said the agent “answered the questions I was asking of him; h handled things in a professional manner in that sense.”
Sheriff Shoar’s propensity for talking to potential witnesses earned him a rebuke from F.D.L.E.
“It would greatly assist us if you would refrain from conducting any further interviews of witnesses,” the agency’s internal affairs chief wrote to the sheriff in April 2013. “Such ad hoc interviews have the potential to negatively impact our ability to conduct a fair and impartial investigation.”
Sheriff Shoar’s own second in command, Mr. Bolante, concurred.
“The main thing I disagreed with was not allowing F.D.L.E. to do their investigation without interference,” said Mr. Bolante, who has since retired. “Because a witness’s name would come up and the sheriff would send a couple guys out to interview that witness. I said, ‘That’s a witness for F.D.L.E. to interview, not us.’”
At the same time, the sheriff mounted a media blitz — with online posts of his report and personal opinions about the case, along with media interviews. Publicly criticizing the subject of an active criminal investigation is frowned upon in most legal circles. According to American Bar Association standards, adopted by the State of Florida, law enforcement officers should refrain from disclosing information about a criminal matter that is “not part of the public court record.”
“He is certainly not in the bounds of proper behavior,” said Walter Mack, a former prosecutor who once served as New York City’s deputy police commissioner for internal affairs.
While publicly condemning Agent Rodgers, the sheriff nonetheless demanded silence from F.D.L.E., even threatening a young agent unconnected to the case who had expressed his opinion in casual conversation with another law enforcement official.
“In the event that I become aware of any future similar conduct, in addition to filing a formal complaint against the offender, I will employ any other remedies available,” the sheriff wrote to F.D.L.E.
The sheriff became so consumed with taking down Agent Rodgers that Mr. Bolante said he often had to run the office himself. The special prosecutor’s chief lawyer on the case, William Gladson, said that even after his boss decided not to prosecute, he had about 50 telephone conversations with Sheriff Shoar, mostly to discuss subsequent investigations and reporting by The Times. The sheriff initiated most of those calls, Mr. Gladson said.
As police chief in St. Augustine, Sheriff Shoar acted quite differently after his own officers came under investigation for their treatment of a group of transients. In a 2001 memo, he criticized local residents who “have waged a deliberate media campaign including use of the print media and voice media to broadcast their version of the events.” Not only was it “grossly unfair” to publicize their complaints before the conclusion of the inquiry, he said, it was “possibly a criminal violation.”
BEARING THE BURDEN
For Agent Rodgers, his friends say, being told to turn in his badge and gun was devastating. That was just the beginning.
The continuing assaults on his reputation, and his inability to speak out for himself, wore on him. His mother was gravely ill, and Vinny Cassidy, a friend and former F.D.L.E. agent, told how Agent Rodgers’s mother died without knowing whether her son would be exonerated. Agent Rodgers battled cancer and spent tens of thousands of dollars on legal bills.
“Many other people would have folded,” Mr. Cassidy said. “I think a lot of people were counting on him to throw in the towel, on both sides of the street.”
But Agent Rodgers did not. “Where do you go to get your reputation back if you don’t hang in?” Mr. Cassidy asked.
Eventually, Mr. Donaway tired of watching Sheriff Shoar lambaste the agent, so he retired early last year, forfeiting, he said, a large sum of money. Over a recent lunch at a Jacksonville restaurant, he said, “I was just so sick, so angry with my agency for not backing him up.”
F.D.L.E. still refuses to comment on the case or let Agent Rodgers speak on his own behalf. “It’s easy to win an argument when only one side is talking,” Mr. Donaway said.
Agent Rodgers did get his job back last year after being cleared of any crimes. His agency counseled him, without discipline, for a handful of mistakes, including not typing his handwritten notes for one interview and incorrectly adding an extra word — “now” — to Deputy Banks’s 911 call, according to Mr. Donaway and F.D.L.E.’s internal affairs report. The special prosecutor concluded in his report that most of Sheriff Shoar’s accusations of serious misconduct were essentially baseless or overblown, though Agent Rodgers had misled some witnesses. (His lawyer disputes that.)
“None of these actions, however, are clearly or provably criminal in nature,” the special prosecutor’s report states, adding, “Indeed, courts, including the United States Supreme Court, have generally allowed enforcement officers to engage in even blatant deception towards witnesses and suspects in the pursuit of justice.”
A second special prosecutor, appointed to examine new allegations about the shooting, took no further action. Even so, his investigator took it upon himself to criticize Agent Rodgers, often echoing Sheriff Shoar’s points of attack. The agent’s lawyer, William J. Sheppard, said those criticisms contained “numerous false, unfounded and unsolicited opinions.” The investigator, Mr. Sheppard added, never contacted Agent Rodgers.
When the sheriff learned the agent was back on the job, he flogged him once more, telling the media that he would receive “remedial training and increased supervision” and could not work criminal cases in St. Johns County.
Like so many of his other statements, this, too, veered out of bounds. Within two weeks of returning, Agent Rodgers was training otheragents and serving in the governor’s protection detail, according to Mr. Donaway. He has also worked in St. Johns County.
A RETURN TO ST. AUGUSTINE
During much of 2013, I tried to get an on-the-record interview with Sheriff Shoar. We talked by phone, email, in his office, over coffee at a local restaurant. I stopped by places he was known to frequent, like the Barnes & Noble on Route 1, hoping to catch him where he relaxed and read. We exchanged titles of our favorite history books.
Over and over he promised to accommodate my request, only to change his mind, once just minutes before the interview was to begin.
This spring, I tried another tack. I paid $65 to attend a county Republican fund-raiser where Sheriff Shoar was a featured speaker. I wanted to hear his views on all that had happened since we last discussed the O’Connell case, and perhaps to glean some insight into what had driven him in his long pursuit of Rusty Rodgers.
At the event, the sheriff, his badge dangling from his sport coat, spoke passionately about the county’s heroin problem and the need for better mental health services. (He recently won an award for his advocacy on behalf of mentally ill people.)
With the questions that followed, donors seemed more interested in the long reach of George Soros, whether there were Islamic terrorist training camps in Florida and the threat of Shariah law.
I approached the sheriff as he was about to leave and asked if we could set a time to speak. He said he would need to think about it. We said our goodbyes, and I left.
A couple of weeks earlier, Sheriff Shoar had shown that the O’Connell case still rankled him. At the sheriff’s annual awards dinner, a protester stood silently outside in the lobby of the public auditorium with a sign saying Ms. O’Connell had been murdered.
“You got to leave,” the sheriff ordered him. “You are trespassing.” The protester, Jeff Gray, said the building was public, owned and paid for by the citizens of St. Johns County and that he would not leave.
“Well, you are leaving one way or another,” the sheriff replied, summoning uniformed officers, who escorted Mr. Gray out of the building under threat of arrest.
Ms. O’Connell’s mother, Patty, says she has grown tired of waiting for the government to deliver justice. So last year, she authorized a private pathologist, a former medical examiner of Orange County, Fla., to exhume the body.
The pathologist, Dr. William R. Anderson, discovered that Ms. O’Connell had a cracked jaw. “The findings are most consistent of blunt force trauma causing incapacitation of Ms. O’Connell, and subsequent gunshot wound inflicted by another,” he wrote in his report. (Dr. Bulic, who had never mentioned the broken jaw, now says the gunshot caused it.)
The exhumation enraged Sheriff Shoar. He called it “reprehensible” and accused Ms. O’Connell’s mother of “molesting” the body by removing it from its “place of rest.” The examination, he said, was conducted by a “paid expert,” not a state medical examiner, and offered nothing that hadn’t been reviewed in the initial autopsy.
Sheriff Shoar was wrong on both counts. According to the O’Connell family, Dr. Anderson performed the examination pro bono. And records show that the cracked jaw was not described in the first pathologist’s autopsy report, even though it was evident in a post-mortem X-ray.
Asked about the sheriff’s comments, Ms. O’Connell’s sister Jennifer Crites offered this terse reply: “He lies because he can.”
For the O’Connells, the grief has been compounded by the sheriff’s embrace of one of their own — Michelle’s brother Scott. Mr. O’Connell was fired from the sheriff’s office for losing his temper after learning there would be no charges in his sister’s death. But Scott was rehired after he concluded that Agent Rodgers manipulated the family into believing that Ms. O’Connell had been murdered.
Patty O’Connell, who now cares for Ms. O’Connell’s 10-year-old daughter, Alexis, wants nothing to do with her son Scott. “There cannot be forgiveness until he says he is sorry for lying about Michelle,” she said. “I know it must eat at his conscience.”
Scott O’Connell did not return a message seeking comment.
The two local medical examiners who sided with Sheriff Shoar experienced their own setbacks in March, when the Florida Medical Examiners Commission accused them of violating state rules in their handling of the O’Connell case.
The panel recommended that Dr. Hobin be suspended for an undetermined period for keeping his amended opinion — that Ms. O’Connell had been “shot by another” — at home, where it was not accessible to the public. Dr. Bulic, the panel said, should be reprimanded for letting people view autopsy photographs of Ms. O’Connell without her family’s permission.
The commission also criticized Dr. Hobin for failing to note the broken jaw in his report. Both doctors can contest that ruling, but so far have not.
Meanwhile, accusations of domestic violence involving the police — the reason I came to St. Augustine in the first place — continue to be an issue in the sheriff’s office. In a single month last summer, three deputy sheriffs were accused of domestic violence; two resigned, and one was fired. A sheriff’s spokesman said the number of episodes was highly unusual.
“I have a long history of holding subordinates accountable,” the sheriff wrote in a letter.
But records from one of the cases, obtained by The Times, suggest a different story.
Two former wives of a deputy named Kevin D. Nickmeyer obtained protective orders after accusing him of domestic violence. He also had a long record of official misconduct, including suspensions, letters of reprimand and threats of termination.
Even so, in 2015, Sheriff Shoar wrote to Mr. Nickmeyer, granting him a raise and thanking him for exemplifying the high professional standards of his office: “Taking Care of People; Be the Best We Can Be in All That We Do; Integrity; and Treating People with Dignity and Respect.”
Less than a year later, Mr. Nickmeyer resigned after being accused of domestic violence by another ex-wife. Even so, several months afterward, the sheriff quietly rehired him for another position, but he resigned again about a week later, records show. When someone complained, he again resigned. He subsequently entered into a deferred-prosecution agreement and must wear a tracking device.
Mr. Nickmeyer agreed to an interview for this article, only to back out.
Here in St. Augustine, the community remains deeply divided over what happened to Michelle O’Connell, even after seven years of verbal and legal combat. Three special prosecutors took no position on how she died. The family still believes she was murdered. The sheriff, Deputy Banks and the medical examiners still say it was suicide. The deputy’s civil rights lawsuit against Agent Rodgers continues.
Robert Hardwick, who worked on the case for the state attorney and is now police chief in St. Augustine Beach, is familiar with the investigation’s complexities. “One day you are 60-40 on homicide; you come in the next day and you hear something else and you are 60-40 suicide,” said the police chief, who considers Sheriff Shoar his mentor and friend.
Chief Hardwick criticized parts of Agent Rodgers’s inquiry, but in an interview with F.D.L.E. investigators, he called the sheriff’s 152-page report “a biased opinion.”
“I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I’m tainted. Everybody’s tainted. The media’s tainted us. The conversations among cops that are local has tainted us.”
What happened, he said, is not fair to anybody. But, he added, “that’s just the way it is.”
2 comments:
Passionless softball of omission wrapped in chicken from the NY Slimes! Pullitsirprize? For what?
Soooooo disapointing!
Small wonder that people so deprived of voice are incited to lawlessness.
http://saintaugdog.com/sadissues/issue1/1page13sad.html
The Times is being extremely generous...personally i would have noted the retarded jackasses who live here and overwhelmingly voted for Shoar's relection.
Shoar is nothing but a symptom of the ignorance which thrives in NE Florida...stupid people get stupid dishonest leaders.
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