New York Times/PBS Frontline Investigation of the O'Connell case

A Death in St. Augustine
Two Gunshots
On a Summer Night
A Deputy’s Pistol, a Dead Girlfriend, a Flawed Inquiry

By Walt Bogdanich and Glenn Silber

News of the shooting arrived via police radio as Deputy Debra Maynard and two other officers were sipping late-night coffee at the Hess gas station, a brightly lit outpost on a slumbering stretch of Dixie Highway on St. Augustine’s south side.
“The call came out, Signal 18, shot fired, possibly one of our own,” Ms. Maynard recalled. “When you hear it’s one of your own — adrenaline’s pumping.”
At 11:25 p.m., the three St. Johns County officers arrived at 4700 Sherlock Place, a one-story suburban house in this historic seaside community. A young deputy, Jonathan Hawley, was already there. “Oh my God,” he cried, seeing a young woman he knew lying on the bedroom floor, an inert, bloody mess.
Michelle O’Connell, 24, the doting mother of a 4-year-old girl, was dying from a gunshot in the mouth. Next to her was a semiautomatic pistol that belonged to her boyfriend, Jeremy Banks, a deputy sheriff for St. Johns County. A second bullet had burrowed into the carpet by her right arm.
Ms. Maynard quickly escorted Mr. Banks, who had been drinking, out of the house. “All of a sudden he started growling like an animal,” she said. With his fists, Mr. Banks pounded dents in a police car.
“I grabbed him and tuned him up,” another deputy, Wesley Grizzard, recalled. “I told him, I don’t care if you’re intoxicated or not, you better sober up.”
Within minutes of the shooting on Sept. 2, 2010, Mr. Banks’s friends, family and even off-duty colleagues began showing up, offering hugs and moral support. He huddled with his stepfather, a deputy sheriff in another county, before a detective interviewed him in a police car.

Mr. Banks’s Account
Detective Jessica Hines interviews Jeremy Banks on the night of the shooting. (3:17)Hines: All right, this is Detective Hines. It isofficially September 3rd at 1:23 in the morning.
Um...
Jeremy... I'm here with Jeremy Banks.
Hines: Jeremy, tell me about tonight. Where...Tell me where you were you at, what did you guys have going on?
Banks: We were at the amphitheater for the concert that went on.And, but, we argued a little bit there.
We, you know, argued a little bit earlier today, but nothing terrible.
Just we were both fed up with each other’s bullcrap that we’ve been going —
Banks: we’ve been dealing with.We’ve been together a year and some odd months.
I guess a month now. But – um...
We were at the show, I enjoyed the show, she enjoyed the show from what I understand.
Banks: And in the car, we were talking about it. We had decided that we were gonna break up.She was gonna move out.
25 seconds later
Banks: We came home and we weren’t arguing when we got home.We got home and
We, we talked about it, we just said, you know, enough’s enough.
We’ve been fighting, we’re done
Banks: and we’re tired of each other’s ——.I told her that I do love her, that I love Alexis, her little girl.
But, I just don’t feel like she’s — that we’re best friends any more.
We just, it’s not working out. And she agreed...
8 seconds later
Banks: I sat on my motorcycle and that’s when I...I heard the gun pop.
Hines: You... You were outside in the yard? Driveway?Banks: My motorcycle was in the garage, I was sitting on it with my head down.Just upset about, you know, the breakup.
Hines: Sure.Banks: I heard it pop and I knew exactly what it was.Just instinct. I just said, “Oh ——.”
And I ran inside, I started screaming her name and the bedroom door was locked and...
I screamed her name again.
Banks: I heard it go off again for the second time.I ran into the living room, I grabbed the phone, and I kicked the bedroom door in.
And I found her laying where she is.
And the sheriff’s office showed up.
Hines: OK.5 minutes 3 seconds later
Hines: What was it —  what’d you get to drink tonight?Banks: I was drinking beer.Hines: What kind of beer?Banks: Bud Light.Hines: Ugh.Banks: Big ones.Not gonna lie.
Hines: How many do you think you had?Banks: Four? Five maybe?Hines: OK.6 minutes 9 seconds later
Hines: And I know this part’s really hard, Jeremy, but...When you did get that door open...
You’re on the phone with 9-1-1. Tell me, tell me exactly what you did.
Banks: I kicked the door open.I kind of veered in and I saw her feet. I ran in.
I saw the blood coming out
and I just grabbed her hand and I started
Banks: I dialed 9-1-1.
.With his off-duty sergeant listening from the front seat, Mr. Banks gave this account: Ms. O’Connell had broken up with him and was packing to move out when she shot herself with his service weapon. He said he had been in another room.
Ms. O’Connell’s family, immediately suspicious, received a starkly different reception from the authorities. Less than two hours before she died, Ms. O’Connell had texted her sister, who was watching her daughter: “I’ll be there soon.” Yet when her outraged brother tried to visit the scene, officers blocked his way. The family’s request for an independent investigation was rebuffed, as was one sister’s attempt to tell the police that in the months before she died, Ms. O’Connell said she had been subjected to domestic abuse by Mr. Banks.
Before the sun rose the next morning over this place that calls itself “the nation’s oldest city,” the sheriff’s investigation was all but over.

Michelle O’Connell and Jeremy Banks, in a photo provided by the O’Connell family.Ms. O’Connell, the sheriff’s office concluded, took her own life. Detectives were so certain in their judgment that they never tested the forensic evidence collected after the shooting. Nor did they interview her family and friends, who would have told them that she was ecstatic over a new full-time job with benefits, including health insurance for her daughter.
Over time, though, the official narrative began to change. The sheriff asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to re-examine the case, and investigators found two neighbors who said they had heard a woman screaming for help that night, followed by gunshots. Their account prompted the medical examiner to revise his opinion from suicide to homicide, a conclusion shared by the crime reconstruction expert hired by state investigators.
Eventually, however, a special prosecutor appointed by Gov. Rick Scott decided there was insufficient evidence to prosecute and closed the case early last year. But that was hardly the final word. The state law enforcement agency asked for a special inquest into the death, saying significant questions remained. The sheriff, David B. Shoar, struck back in support of his officer, prompting an extraordinary conflict between two powerful law enforcement agencies.
And through it all, the O’Connell family continued to believe that the sheriff’s office, investigating one of its own, had blinded itself to the possibility that the shooting was a fatal case of domestic violence.
Domestic abuse is believed to be the most frequently unreported crime, and it is particularly corrosive when it involves the police. Taught to wield authority through control, threats or actual force, officers carry their training, their job stress and their guns home with them, amplifying the potential for abuse.
Related article: Departments Slow to Police Their Own AbusersYet nationwide, interviews and documents show, police departments have been slow to recognize and discipline abusers in uniform, largely because of a predominantly male blue wall of silence. Victims are often reluctant to file complaints, fearing that an officer’s colleagues simply will not listen or understand, or that if they do, the abuser may be stripped of his weapon and ultimately his family’s livelihood.
Officers investigating possible domestic violence face special circumstances “when it’s somebody you know or you’ve worked with,” said Mark Wynn, a former Nashville police official who teaches departments how to use model rules for handling domestic violence in their ranks. “Like the military, you build bonds together by saving one another’s lives.”
The model rules, issued by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, insist on zero tolerance for abusers and urge departments to begin formal investigations of all complaints immediately. Yet most departments, including the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office, follow only parts of the policy. Law enforcement officers in Florida are arrested on charges of domestic abuse more often than they are on charges of any other form of misconduct, but other offenses are far more likely to cost them their jobs, according to an analysis by The New York Times of more than 29,000 complaints received by the state.
In St. Johns County, a review of records found three cases in recent years in which sheriff’s officers failed to open immediate investigations of domestic-abuse reports involving their colleagues. Two years before Ms. O’Connell’s death, supervisors learned of accusations of domestic abuse against an officer, but followed up aggressively only after his frightened wife fled the house naked, clutching her child, and called the authorities. Dismissal was recommended, but the sheriff kept the officer on staff.
The O’Connell case, in which the sheriff’s department failed to explore the possibility of domestic violence, is a vivid demonstration of what can go wrong in an inquiry when the police, lacking effective supervision and a clear mandate, confront potential abuse in their own ranks.
“Death in St. Augustine,” a “Frontline“ documentary produced in conjunction with this article, will have its premiere at 10 p.m. Tuesday on most PBS stations. A preview is online now.The Times examined the case in collaboration with the PBS investigative news program “Frontline,” reviewing police, medical and legal records, interviewing dozens of people connected to the case, and consulting independent forensic and law enforcement experts.
The examination found that the investigation was mishandled from the start, not just by the sheriff and his officers, but also by medical examiners who espoused scientifically suspect theories that went unchallenged by prosecutors. Because detectives concluded so quickly that the shooting was a suicide, investigators failed to perform the police work that is standard in suspicious shootings, including collecting and testing all available evidence and canvassing neighbors.
“This investigation stinks,” said Vernon J. Geberth, a former New York City police commander and the author of a widely used textbook on investigating suspicious deaths, who reviewed the case at The Times’s request. “Every death investigation should be treated as a homicide until proven differently.”
Sheriff Shoar, the most powerful elected official in this North Florida county and a former co-chairman of its domestic violence task force, declined to be interviewed for this article. But in a letter to The Times, he said, “I have a long history of holding subordinates accountable.”
Yet only when The Times began examining the case more than two years after the young mother’s death did the sheriff publicly acknowledge that his investigators “prematurely embraced the mind-set” that she had killed herself.
Even so, he defended his inquiry in a 153-page report and attacked those who had found fault with it, particularly two agents with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. At the sheriff’s request, the state agency is investigating his accusation that the agents engaged in misconduct during their inquiry.
Mr. Banks declined to be interviewed. But he has told investigators that he never harmed Ms. O’Connell. He recently filed suit against the state agency and its lead investigator, alleging misconduct.
In his letter, Sheriff Shoar called Mr. Banks a fine young man stigmatized for life.
“This case,” the sheriff wrote, “has been and always will be a suicide.”
The First RespondersWhat struck Crystal Lynn Cuzzort most were the little red slippers, just like ones her daughter used to have.
“I remember looking around and seeing little kids’ stuff and pictures,” said Ms. Cuzzort, one of the paramedics who was trying to save Ms. O’Connell as her airway filled with blood.
Ms. Cuzzort found herself wondering what had really happened. “Not that it’s out of the ordinary for anyone to commit suicide — we know that — but it is not common that a girl that age, 23, 24 years old, however old she was, but to have a young child and to commit suicide. She was a really pretty girl, and it looked like she was well taken care of,” she said. “She just didn’t fit the picture of typical suicide.”
Twenty-three minutes after the police arrived, Ms. O’Connell was pronounced dead.
The following account of that night is based largely on sworn, recorded interviews by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
playpauseThe 911 Call
Mr. Banks reports the shooting. (1:06)Operator: 9-1-1.Banks: Hey!Please get someone to my house, it’s 4700 Sherlock Place.
Operator: What’s going on?Banks: Please, it’s my girlfriend, I think she just shot herself, there’s blood everywhere, please— Operator: She what?Banks: She shot herself. Please— Operator: OK, one— Banks: Please just get somebody here please— Operator: Ma’am? Ma’am, I need ya to calm down.Banks: It’s mister, it’s sir!Operator: Ma’am, listen to me.Banks: It’s sir, it’s sir. Listen, hang on, now look here, let me tell you the truth.I’m Deputy Banks with the St. Johns County sheriff’s office. I’m, I work with ya’ll.
Get someone here now!
Operator: OK I need you to calm down, then. You know how it goes.What's the address? I don't— 
Banks: 4700 Sherlock Place.Operator: OK, what's going on there?Banks: — my girlfriend just shot herself with my duty weapon.Please get someone here now. Please.
Operator: Sir, we’re doing that while I’m talking to you. Is she still breathing?Banks: No! There’s blood coming out of everywhere. Please— Operator: OK, so she’s not breathing.Banks: Call dispatch on tac 2, get them here now.Operator: Sir they are on the phone, I need you to calm down.Banks: — please, please, please— Operator: Jeremy, we're coming as fast as we can, OK?Calm down for me, OK?
Banks: Please, you don’t understand, she just shot herself.Please get someone here, please!

.The job of informing the family fell to Ms. Maynard and another officer. They stopped first to tell Ms. O’Connell’s brother Scott, himself a St. Johns deputy. He had introduced his sister to Mr. Banks.
“I said, ‘Michelle’s not with you anymore,’ ” Ms. Maynard said. After the initial shock, he “did the strangest thing,” she said. “He immediately got up and got his gun, and we weren’t sure what he was going to do with it. And brought it to us and his car keys and said: ‘Please take these away from me right now. Get them out of here.’ ”
Mr. O’Connell then drove with Ms. Maynard to see his mother, Patty, who also worked at the sheriff’s office, as a file clerk. “My mom opened the door with a smile on her face — heartbreaking,” he said.
Back at 4700 Sherlock Place, investigators knew little beyond what Mr. Banks had told them — that after hearing the first shot, he ran in from the garage, heard the second shot, broke down the locked door and called 911. There was no suicide note, no apparent witnesses. A child suddenly had no mother to care for her.

Diagram based on police photos of the scene.
And the sheriff faced an important decision: have his office investigate the case itself or, as is often done when an officer may be involved in a suspicious shooting, call in independent investigators from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
If anyone seriously considered this, it is not reflected in the sheriff’s official reports. The next month, Sheriff Shoar’s point man on the case, Lt. Charles Bradley, told the O’Connell family that the state’s investigators did not have the experience for the task.
“To be honest with you,” he said, according to a recording of the meeting, “my investigators are far and above better than what F.D.L.E. is ever going to give you.”
He did not disclose that the two lead detectives on the case had worked just three homicides between them, or that one supervisor had been disciplined for an “inept” investigation of an attempted murder, records show.
Lieutenant Bradley did object to the tone of the family’s questions.
“I feel like this is a damned inquisition on me,” he said. “I haven’t done anything wrong, guys. The sheriff’s office hasn’t done anything wrong.”
The early consensus among the detectives was that Ms. O’Connell had taken her own life. “For her to stand still and allow somebody to put a firearm in her mouth is ridiculous,” Eugene Tolbert, one of two detectives on the case, said.
Plus, there was “absolutely no bruising on Michelle,” indicating the absence of a struggle, Lieutenant Bradley told the family. That wasn’t exactly correct: she had a bleeding cut above her right eye, an injury that would become a central forensic issue in the case.
Not all of the officers were so certain about what had happened.

“I’ll just say it — when I first walked into that room, the first thought that went through my mind was, this is not good for Jeremy,” said Sgt. Scott Beaver, who initially took charge of the scene. “We need to document the scene as it is as much as possible, because I felt there would be questions later on.”
“I’ll just say it — when I first walked into that room, the first thought that went through my mind was, this is not good for Jeremy,” said Sgt. Scott Beaver, who initially took charge of the scene. “We need to document the scene as it is as much as possible, because I felt there would be questions later on.”
At his direction, an officer took photographs that show the gun — a Heckler & Koch .45-caliber pistol — on the ground just inches from Ms. O’Connell’s left hand, suggesting that she would have used her weaker hand to shoot herself. Curiously, the gun’s tactical search light, attached to the barrel, is on. There is also the unexplained second bullet, buried in the carpet several inches from her body.
“I mean, I was in the homicide unit for a few years, and it didn’t add up,” Sergeant Beaver said. “But I didn’t do more investigation into this to see why things were like they were.”
Officers also found two empty pill bottles belonging to Mr. Banks visible in Ms. O’Connell’s open purse. Pills from those bottles were found in her jeans pocket, and tests later found alcohol but no trace of pills in her system. If she had intended to kill herself by overdosing, why did she shoot herself? Lieutenant Bradley theorized that Ms. O’Connell made a “snap” decision.
Still, she would have had to pull the gun from its retention holster — designed to make it difficult for an unauthorized person, particularly one unfamiliar with guns, to withdraw a weapon.
Detective Tolbert said that every time something “bugged me” about the crime scene, there was a plausible explanation.
“You could say, she was holding the gun in her left hand, but she’s right-handed — that’s suspicious,” he said. But if she was intent on suicide, it would not matter which hand she used.
“As far as two shots being fired,” the detective added, “that kind of bugged me. But the more I thought about it, well, if she’s not familiar with the weapon, which is kind of what I got by the fact that the tac light is on, maybe she’s sitting here and she’s looking at this thing and doesn’t know how and, you know, then lets one ride by accident.”
The other detective, Jessica Hines, said she found nothing to suggest anything other than suicide.
Hours later, a sheriff’s officer, dropping off Ms. O’Connell’s car keys, visited her sister Christine. “He comes up and says: ‘Well, the investigation is done. It’s a suicide,’ ” she said.

Michelle O’Connell’s sister Christine; her mother, Patty; and her close friend Ciara Morris.The quick embrace of suicide colored investigators’ decisions from the start.
“It’s almost in police officers’ DNA, when they hear the word suicide, it’s like, ‘Oh, O.K., it’s not an important crime,’ ” said Mr. Geberth, the expert on homicide investigations. “Assume the suicide position — take shortcuts, don’t do this, don’t do that.”
In fact, though investigators collected the gun, clothing and other evidence, they never tested it for fingerprints, DNA or gunshot residue. Officers also failed to canvass neighbors; failed to file required reports on what officers had seen that night; failed to download Mr. Banks’s cellphone data or collect and test one of the shirts he wore that night and failed to isolate and photograph Mr. Banks before he was interviewed.
Two days after the shooting, a medical examiner, Dr. Frederick Hobin, performed an autopsy and concluded that Ms. O’Connell had taken her own life.

One morning over coffee, Dr. Hobin explained that because suicides are so fraught with emotion, they should be investigated even more rigorously than homicides.
“Investigating a suicide,” he said, “is like letting out a black dog that will come back later and bite you.”
A Lack Of CuriosityAlthough there was no suicide note, investigators believed that they had found the next best thing — cryptic text messages expressing concern about her daughter, Alexis, that Ms. O’Connell had sent while attending a rock concert that evening with Mr. Banks and her brother Sean.

Ms. O’Connell at a rock concert with Mr. Banks hours before she died, in a photo provided by the O’Connell family.
“Promise me one thing,” she texted her sister Christine, “Lexi will be happy and always have atood life.”
To her brother Scott: “Lexi never forget.”
To investigators, the texts signaled a despondent young woman on the verge of suicide.
Remarkably, though, they never asked her sister and brother to interpret those messages. Had they done so, had they ever interviewed her family or friends, they would have heard a very different narrative: about a young woman with a new job and high hopes for an independent future, but also a fear of Mr. Banks and how he might react when she announced that she was leaving him.
Ms. O’Connell’s life had not been trouble-free. She grew up without a father and competed for attention and space with five older siblings in a crowded St. Augustine apartment. The ocean and beach were her escape.
“She was an amazing athlete,” said her eldest sister, Jennifer Crites. “She could climb a tree faster than anybody.”
By her early teenage years, she began doing poorly in school and rebelling. When she was 15, she was taken into custody after a fight with a brother. The police were called to the O’Connell apartment again the next year, after she fought with a sister.
But with medication and counseling for what juvenile records describe as anger problems and depression, Michelle turned herself around. Her schoolwork and attitude improved profoundly, earning praise and enthusiastic support from juvenile authorities and clearing the way for her to work part time caring for children. “She had a great little smile, and children would do whatever she said,” her mother said.
At age 20, she gave birth to Alexis. “Lexi was her world,” said Ciara Morris, a close friend. “Everything that you asked Michelle to do, it was always, ‘Well, how is this going to affect Lexi?’ ”
As a single mother, Ms. O’Connell sometimes had to work three jobs. So when she secured full-time employment in a day care center, she felt she had finally made it.
“She had the job of her dreams,” said Teresa Woodward, her employer and one of her former high school teachers.
“She could bring Alexis in and take her home with her. No weekends, no nights, and she loved that. She had retirement benefits. She had everything.”
Hours before she died, Ms. O’Connell left her mother a voice mail message, saying she would call the next day to make breakfast plans. She also stopped for lunch at Christine’s apartment.
playpauseMs. O’Connell’s voice mail
A message to her mother on the day she died. (0:16)Machine: Saved message.O’Connell: Hey, Mom, I’m sorry that you, uh,got upset earlier.
Just want to tell you I love you
and I will call you tomorrow morning
O’Connell: and hopefully we can have breakfast one day.All right, love you, bye.

.When the O’Connell family met later with Lieutenant Bradley, the sheriff’s representative, Christine complained that on the night of the shooting, officers had rebuffed her efforts to tell them what her sister had revealed at that lunch.
“I said: Am I allowed to submit a statement? Because she told me a lot of things about — and I’m just going to spell it out for anyone here — domestic violence. She came to my house, she said: ‘I’m leaving. I’m scared of this and that.’ And I said, ‘Michelle, don’t go to the concert,’ ” she told the lieutenant.
This information was of no use, the police told her, because it was hearsay.
Later, Christine told state investigators that Michelle said she might have to make Mr. Banks believe that breaking up was his idea.

Ms. O’Connell with her daughter, Alexis, in a photo provided by the O’Connell family.
In an interview with The Times, Christine recalled that a few months earlier, Michelle called to say she was bleeding vaginally after Mr. Banks had shown her “a submissive move” during play-wrestling that got out of hand. “He slammed me so hard, and he put his knee up into my chest,” Michelle told her, she said.
But Michelle would not let her call an ambulance. “She said, ‘Please, you’re going to make it hard on me. Please, I don’t want any trouble.’ ”
Christine O’Connell said there were other incidents that went unreported for fear of causing trouble for Mr. Banks and for her relatives who worked at the sheriff’s office.
On one occasion, two family members said, Ms. O’Connell told them that she had come home to find Mr. Banks masturbating to a cellphone picture of a former girlfriend; then, she said, he smeared semen on her face and hair. Mr. Banks denied the latter part of that story, records show.
playpauseThe ‘Leg Sweep’
Mr. Banks said he took Ms. O’Connell to the ground after she threatened him. (1:16)
Agent Rusty Rodgers: You said you had to sort of put her on the ground. How exactly did you do that?Banks: Well, I grabbed her wrist and I put my leg behind hers and I just kinda swung her around and I put it,I just held her wrist on the ground until she calmed down because I didn’t wanna get hit.
Agent: Would that be what you would classify as an armbar takedown?Banks: I would… More of a leg sweep. I, you know, I put my leg behind hers and I just kind of turned and used her own momentum.Agent: How tall are you?Banks: Uh, 6-1-ish?Agent: How much do you weigh?Banks: 225.Agent: And how big is Michelle?Banks: Uh, she was a good six inches shorter than me, I guess, maybe, I don’t know.Agent: The autopsy report said she was 5-foot-4 and weighed about 119 pounds.Banks: OK.Agent: So you felt it necessary to do a leg sweep on her?Banks: Well I felt it necessary to kind of neutralize the situation and not get hit.Agent: OK, that’s good in police jargon. We’re just talking amongst ourselves, here—Banks: Well I —Agent: person-to-person—Banks: I'm sorry I — you know, I —Agent: In other words, I’m just asking you as a person, as a person-to-person, not as a textbook response to a police inquiry, OK?I’m just saying, was she that aggressive toward you, where you felt like to had to do a leg sweep to take her down?
Banks: She said, “I hate you,” she threw a chair down, and she ran across the house after me, sir, I had to do what I – I did what I did to make sure I didn’t get hit.Agent: OK.
.And about a month before the shooting, during an argument that turned physical, Mr. Banks used a “leg sweep” to put her on the ground so she would stop hitting him, he told the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Mr. Banks weighed almost twice as much as Ms. O’Connell.
“She was afraid of him, and Alexis was afraid of him,” Christine O’Connell said.
Had investigators wanted to know Ms. O’Connell’s mood in the hours before she died, they could have asked her brother Sean, who was with the couple at the concert.
Seeing that Mr. Banks seemed “pissed off,” Mr. O’Connell said, he told him: “ ‘Why don’t you trade spots with me and Michelle? If you don’t want to hang out with her, I will.’ So we were hanging out, and we were hugging and listening to music, having a good time, and she seemed really happy.”
After Ms. O’Connell’s death, her family found photos from the concert on her camera. The last one was taken around the time she texted her sister that she would be there soon. She is smiling.
Upon learning that investigators believed she had killed herself, Ms. Woodward called the sheriff’s office to say Ms. O’Connell would never have done that. “We wanted to be interviewed,” she said. No one came.
Twelve days after the shooting, Mr. Banks submitted to a second interview. In the videotaped interview, he made a surprising admission — that he had read the department’s investigative file.
“I know I probably shouldn’t have, but I just wanted to know what went down on the other side,” he told the detective, who did not respond.
“How did he gain access to a confidential investigative report, and how come she didn’t challenge him on that?” said Mr. Geberth, the homicide expert.
“He was never treated like a suspect,” said Ms. Morris, Ms. O’Connell’s friend. “He was treated like a brother. I mean, that’s the best way I can put it. He was treated like a brother.”
The BoyfriendJeremy Banks comes from a law enforcement family. His father, now deceased, was an officer in the state’s wildlife division; his stepfather works for the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.

Jeremy Banks, right, in a photo provided by the O’Connell family.
Mr. Banks’s job conferred power and authority at a young age, no college required. He carried a gun, wore a uniform and held a largely recession-proof position in an organization that commanded deep respect in the community.
“I believed in the sheriff’s office wholeheartedly. My family, you know, worked for the sheriff’s office,” said Ms. O’Connell’s sister Jennifer.
Mr. Banks, 23 when Ms. O’Connell died, had been on the force nearly four years. Later, he would admit that he had not always had “the best reputation.” “I was looked at as a young punk, just cocky, just full of himself,” he told internal affairs officers after being brought up on departmental charges for making an obscene gesture in uniform.
In the O’Connell case, the only formal accusation against Mr. Banks, for which he was reprimanded, was that he had not secured his service pistol. Indeed, there are indications that he was not always careful in storing his guns.
Crime scene photos show two long guns leaning against the wall in Mr. Banks’s house. Although departmental policy requires that weapons be secured, Mr. Banks told investigators that he sometimes dropped his gun belt on the floor after work.
“He had guns everywhere,” said Michael Plott, a deputy who once roomed with Mr. Banks. “I told him he had to keep the guns locked up in his room when my kids were there.”
playpauseDeputy Plott on Mr. Banks
Statement from his former roommate. (1:28)Plott: He used to live with me. He used to live in my house.22 seconds later
Plott: He’s had temper issues. He’d get mad and he’d run out of the house.Walk down the street, disappear for a while.
1 minute 30 seconds later
Plott: He would just, he’d start, he’d drink and he’d just get pissed.You know, he’d throw —— around and just throw a fit.
30 seconds later
Plott: There was a couple times where, you know, I had to, you know...grab a hold of him, say, man, you just need to chill out, you know.
5 minutes 10 seconds later
Plott: There was one night. I think they’d just got back from the Conch House, and, um...He was...
Apparently a girl he was supposed to meet or was supposed to go and hang out with him.
She called and canceled and he just, you know, just got really pissed off.
Plott: It's like, dude, you know, there’s more people out there.He was just cold, and mad, and angry, and he went in his room and slammed the door.
And then he came back out a little bit later and ran out of the house and I was like, you know...
I told John, I says, you know, he’s just trying to get attention...
Plott: Let him, let him blow off steam. I’m not his father. I’m not his babysitter.
.Deputy Plott said his former roommate also had anger issues. “His temper was uncontrollable,” he said. “He’d drink and he’d just get pissed” and throw things around, Deputy Plott added. But both he and another former roommate of Mr. Banks agreed that they had never seen him violent.
Mr. Banks nearly got into a fight at Thanksgiving at the O’Connells. The eldest brother, Justin, felt that Mr. Banks had treated his sister shabbily and insisted he leave. Mr. Banks refused, and with tempers rising told Scott, his fellow deputy, that he was “Signal 0” — carrying a weapon.
“I said, ‘Well, Jeremy, why would you bring a gun into a Thanksgiving dinner?’ ” Scott O’Connell told state investigators. “It’s time for you to leave.” The argument ended there, but the party was ruined.
Mr. Banks told state investigators that over time, his yearlong relationship with Michelle O’Connell had devolved into near-constant bickering. So, on the ride home from the concert, when she said she was leaving him, “I said, ‘Are we breaking up?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ And I was, ‘All right.’ And we were talking about it, and we, we, I raised my voice, she raised her voice, we argued. But we got to the house, we were fine.”
Mr. Banks told investigators that back home, they did not raise their voices.
“We bought a dog sometime last year, and I asked her, I said, ‘Who’s going to get Chuck?’ She said: ‘You keep him. I’ve got Alexis, and I’ll be fine.” Everything was calm, he said, and “I told her I loved her.”
As she continued packing, Mr. Banks said, he asked for one last kiss. She said no and asked him to leave, so he retreated to the open garage to sit on his motorcycle and wait. Soon after, he said, he heard a pop.
“I knew exactly what it was.”
A Mysterious BloggerWithin days of the shooting, a woman at a computer 2,700 miles away in Washington State came across a tiny news article that struck her as odd. It reported that the unidentified girlfriend of an unidentified deputy sheriff in St. Augustine had used his service weapon to take her own life, and that no foul play was suspected.
Over the years, the woman, who blogs as “Cloudwriter,” had trained herself to spot suspicious cases of domestic abuse involving police officers. The subject had special meaning for her, she said, because she had had a troubled marriage to a police officer.
After reading the article, published Sept. 3, 2010, she became angry that the names had been withheld. “She deserved a name,” said the blogger, who does not want to be identified for fear of threats. “She deserved an investigation. She deserved media coverage. She deserved for the conditions to be examined the same as me. I would want that, and I want that for her.”
With few leads, she began posting on the Internet, looking for a name. Eventually she found it, along with the name of Jeremy Banks.
“Never did I say Jeremy did it,” she said, adding, “This was not a ‘Let’s crucify Jeremy Banks.’ This was, ‘Let’s find out what happened.’ ”
For the O’Connell family and friends, the blog became a rallying point. “She gave our family a voice,” said Ms. Crites, one of the sisters.
In January 2011, with the blog post drawing nearly 250 comments and the family complaining to the sheriff’s office about its investigation, Sheriff Shoar asked for an independent inquiry by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Leading the inquiry was Rusty Rodgers, a 30-year veteran of law enforcement, named the agency’s Special Agent of the Year in 2008 and the Investigator of the Year by the State Law Enforcement Chiefs’ Association in 2010. He was well known in St. Johns County, having been called in before on sensitive cases.
In the coming months, Mr. Rodgers would do what the sheriff’s office had not: He interviewed the O’Connell and Banks families and others. He sent evidence for testing, hired a crime reconstruction expert and interviewed many employees of the sheriff’s office.
Nothing made a bigger impact than his quick discovery of the two neighbors, Stacey Boswell and Heather Ladley, who said they were talking outside on the night the fatal shot was fired. Mr. Rodgers had gotten a tip from Ms. O’Connell’s friend Ciara Morris, who had heard that the women might know something important.
In separate interviews, the neighbors told Mr. Rodgers nearly identical stories: They were smoking cigarettes in Ms. Boswell’s open garage when they heard the faint sound of arguing. Curious, they walked down the driveway to hear what was being said.
A man and woman were screaming, Ms. Boswell said in an interview with The Times. “There was something wrong,” she said. “There was nothing playful, no nothing. It was somebody that was scared.”
What came next was unexpected. “We heard her yell ‘Help,’ and there was one gunshot, and then she yelled ‘Help’ again, and there was a second gunshot,” Ms. Ladley told Mr. Rodgers. After that, silence.
“It was probably 10, maybe 15 minutes, and then the sirens came,” Ms. Boswell said. “That’s why we didn’t call anybody.”
The next day, the women said, they learned from a news crew in the neighborhood that the shooting had occurred in a deputy’s house. “I wasn’t really sure if I should say anything,” Ms. Ladley said. “I didn’t know if I wanted to be involved in giving a statement against a deputy.”
Their account called into question Mr. Banks’s statements that he and Ms. O’Connell had not argued or raised their voices at the house that evening. The women gave sworn statements. Given the profound implications of their accounts, Mr. Rodgers also arranged for the Secret Service to give them polygraph tests. Both passed.
On the basis of those statements, the pathologist, Dr. Hobin, changed his ruling to homicide.

After Sheriff Shoar called in the state investigators, he assured employees at a meeting that the agency “won’t find anything,” recalled Ms. O’Connell’s mother, who worked in the office.
It took Mr. Rodgers just two weeks to prove him wrong.
A Question of ForensicsFor months, the forensic evidence collected by the sheriff’s office had been sitting, unexamined. It was not until February 2011 that state investigators finally tested for fingerprints, DNA and gunshot residue. What they found raised a host of questions.
No blood was found on the gun, nor did it have any DNA or fingerprints from Mr. Banks, who had worn his gun belt on his previous shift. Ms. O’Connell’s DNA was found on the gun, but there was no trace of her on the two pill bottles in her purse.
The lab found a forensically insignificant amount of gunshot residue on Mr. Banks’s hands, even though he said he held Ms. O’Connell moments after she shot herself. Because a positive test can result from simply entering a room shortly after a gun goes off or by touching someone in that room, Mr. Rodgers suspected that Mr. Banks had washed his hands before the test — something he denies, records show. Significant residue was found on Ms. O’Connell’s hand.
The lab also detected two tiny spots of Ms. O’Connell’s blood on the inside of Mr. Banks’s T-shirt. He told investigators he did not know how the blood had gotten there.

Ms. O’Connell had a cut above her right eye, shown in an autopsy photo.
But the central forensic question concerned the bleeding cut above Ms. O’Connell’s right eye, and whether it was a defensive wound — a possible sign of a violent struggle before the fatal shot.
To make sense of all this, the agency sought the opinion of a crime scene reconstructionist, Jerry Findley. Mr. Findley, a former police officer who has testified as an expert witness more than 150 times, was known in St. Johns law enforcement circles, having consulted on three cases there.
Mr. Findley believed that the eye cut had indeed occurred before the fatal shot. The dimensions of the wound, he said, matched the protruding gun sight on the end of the pistol’s barrel.
That conclusion was in conflict with the finding of Dr. Hobin, who found no evidence of battery and attributed the cut to the ejected bullet casing. Firearms experts told The Times, though, that the casing would have ejected away from her eye.

Mr. Findley also thought the location of the two spent shells might reveal something about who fired the gun.
He acknowledged that the shells’ location can sometimes mislead investigators because rescue workers may have accidentally kicked them. But that was highly unlikely in this case, he said, because there were sizable objects on the ground between the body and the shells. “You’d almost have to have a pitching wedge or something of that nature to get them over,” he said.
Mr. Findley said he fired the gun 18 times in different positions and concluded that for the shells to end up where they had — in the corner of the room, behind and to the left of the body — whoever pulled the trigger had to have been left-handed. Unlike Ms. O’Connell, Mr. Banks is left-handed. Mr. Findley also wrote that he found the absence of Mr. Banks’s DNA on the gun “suspicious.” Mr. Banks has denied cleaning the gun before the police arrived.
In late April, Mr. Findley submitted his findings to the state agency.
“The totality of the circumstances are not consistent with suicide,” Mr. Findley concluded. “However, they are consistent with homicide.”

That conclusion energized the investigation. The state agency, which has no prosecutorial authority, began briefing the local state attorney, R. J. Larizza, and his staff. His investigators examined autopsy photos and noticed what looked like a broken tooth, not documented by the medical examiner. (Dr. Hobin has acknowledged that he should have documented the mouth more thoroughly.) Eager to learn if it had been damaged in a fight or by the gun, prosecutors began considering whether to exhume Ms. O’Connell’s body.
Then, with momentum building, the investigation was jolted by several events. In October, citing his close working relationship with the sheriff, Mr. Larizza asked the governor to appoint a special prosecutor. But before stepping aside, he told Dr. Hobin that he should wait for the new prosecutor before filing the revised finding of homicide, the pathologist said in an interview. Dr. Hobin never did file it, and he was soon joined by a new chief medical examiner, Dr. Predrag Bulic.
Mr. Larizza did not respond to messages asking about Dr. Hobin’s account and about why he had waited months to declare a conflict of interest.
Dr. Bulic aggressively took control of the case. Ms. O’Connell’s mother had agreed to the exhumation, but the effort came to a halt after Dr. Bulic said it “would not produce any further forensic evidence,” records show.
Dr. Bulic reviewed the case file and solidly backed the sheriff’s determination of suicide.
He argued that there were no signs of battery and offered yet another explanation for the cut above the eye: Ms. O’Connell, he said, had turned the gun upside down, put the gun barrel in her mouth and pulled the trigger with her thumb. At that moment, the tactical light attached to the bottom of the gun barrel — now on top — had broken the skin above her eye.
That assumes Ms. O’Connell could have taken the gun from the retention holster in the first place.
Dr. Bulic could not remove a replica of the gun from the same make and model holster provided by The Times. After struggling with it, he asked, “Does anybody know how to open it?”
Dr. Bulic said that he probably would have figured it out eventually. “I see your point,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that even a child cannot pull that by accident.”
Nonetheless, Dr. Bulic’s upside-down-gun theory would come to dominate discussion of the case.
But there was a problem: The laws of physics, not to mention crime scene evidence, made the theory not only highly unlikely, but virtually impossible.
“Dr. Bulic’s theory is fraught with problems and almost laughable,” said Peter De Forest, a widely respected forensic scientist. “It’s emblematic of the entire official investigation.”
Occam’s RazorDr. De Forest has spent a lifetime trying to make sense of complex crime scenes, while passing on lessons learned to generations of future investigators at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
“We get this idea from the media that we have all this high-tech stuff being done all the time,” said Dr. De Forest, who has a doctorate in criminology and has served as a consultant and expert witness for the police, prosecutors and defense lawyers. “The reality is that in many cases, there’s very little scientific input early in the investigation.”
That is particularly true, he said, in smaller jurisdictions like St. Johns County, where investigators have little experience with complex crimes. “Much of the problem in this case stems from a very cursory scene investigation and a very cursory autopsy,” he said. “Because of it, normally avoidable ambiguities abound.”
Given the significance of the cut above Ms. O’Connell’s eye, The Times asked three independent experts to evaluate Dr. Bulic’s finding that the tactical light cut into her skin as the gun was fired. All said the theory lacked credibility.
“The idea of it recoiling forward is absurd,” Dr. De Forest said. “Basically it appears to be an attempt to explain the wound without considering the possibility of antecedent physical violence.”
Peter Diaczuk, a firearms expert at John Jay, said he had fired guns tens of thousands of times and never experienced a gun moving forward. With a reporter present, he test-fired the same make and model gun with the same tactical light and documented the result with high-speed photography. “The tac light went rearward along with the rest of the gun,” he said.
Mr. Geberth, the New York expert on homicide investigations, said it was “absolutely ludicrous” that Ms. O’Connell “would take a gun, turn a tac light on, turn it upside down to shoot herself.”
Dr. Bulic’s theory was flawed for another reason, according to Dr. De Forest and Mr. Diaczuk: If Ms. O’Connell held the gun as Dr. Bulic suggested, the spent casing might not have ejected, because her grip — left hand underneath, right thumb pulling the trigger — would have covered the ejection port or impeded the rearward movement of the slide that ejects the shell.
If the shell had ejected, it would have gone in the opposite direction from where it was found. In addition, her hand would have been wounded, the experts said.
“This slide comes back incredibly fast and has two very sharp edges on the bottom rail,” Mr. Diaczuk said. Autopsy records mention no wounds to the hands.
Finally, Dr. Bulic appears to have measured the gun incorrectly. He said the distance from the outer rim of the tactical light to the gun barrel precisely matched the distance — 3 inches — from the cut above Ms. O’Connell’s eye to her mouth. As proof, Dr. Bulic taped a picture of the actual gun on top of an autopsy photo of Ms. O’Connell’s face.
But Mr. Diaczuk measured the gun and found that the distance from the outer rim of the tactical light to the top of the gun barrel was 2 3/16 inches — a “huge” error. “I’m not saying that the tactical light could not have made that injury,” he said. “I’m saying that it did not make that injury at the same time that the fatal shot was fired because it simply doesn’t line up.”
The Times gave Dr. Bulic the replica of the gun and tactical light, which measures within a tenth of an inch of the actual weapon, and asked him to demonstrate how the eye wound might have occurred. When he placed the barrel in his mouth, the tactical light came nowhere near the skin above his eye.
To Dr. De Forest, there is a simpler — and more plausible — explanation: Ms. O’Connell was battered before the fatal shot.
“There’s an old principle of logic,” he said, “called Occam’s razor — that if you have to twist things around and have a lot more explanations, that the simplest answer is often the best one.”
Special Prosecutor DecidesAs the new year approached, the O’Connell investigation had followed an increasingly tangled path. It fell to the special prosecutor, Brad King, a longtime state attorney from a nearby district, to assess the two opposing scenarios of how Michelle O’Connell had died.
In March 2012, Mr. King’s office contacted the O’Connells and said he and his team would deliver his decision at the St. Augustine courthouse.
Everyone sat around a long table, and as Mr. King made his opening remarks, Ms. O’Connell’s mother grew impatient.
“They were beating around the bush, just giving real vague descriptions of what was going on, and she says, ‘Are you going to prosecute Jeremy Banks for the death of my daughter or not?’ ” recalled Michelle’s sister Jennifer. “And he said, ‘No, ma’am.’ ”
“The day my family met with Brad King I refer to as the second-worst day of my life,” the other sister, Christine, said. “Losing my sister was the worst.” Scott, the brother who worked as a deputy for Sheriff Shoar, unleashed a tirade so emotionally charged that it cost him his job.
Dominick Pape, the head of the state law enforcement agency’s Jacksonville office, was so unhappy that he called for a special inquest.
According to a five-page memo from Mr. King’s office, the decision had been based primarily on the pathologists’ findings. “Three medical examiners have reviewed the file and concluded that this was a suicide,” it states. To Mr. Pape, their conclusions — particularly Dr. Bulic’s upside-down-gun theory — were confusing and unpersuasive.
Dr. Hobin, the original pathologist, would ultimately change his finding three times. After saying it was suicide and then homicide, he told a local reporter he did not know what had happened, before telling The Times that he again believed it was suicide.
Mr. King had also asked a former medical examiner in his district, Dr. Steven Cogswell, to review the case.
As a military pathologist in the mid-1990s, Dr. Cogswell had been criticized for concluding that Commerce Secretary Ron Brown had been shot in the head before his plane crashed in Croatia, killing all aboard. Air Force officials categorically rejected his finding.
Asked about the O’Connell case in an interview, Dr. Cogswell said he could not recall it in detail.
Mr. Pape also complained that Dr. Bulic and Dr. Cogswell had not written reports explaining their decisions. Dr. Bulic said he had not done so because the case was actually Dr. Hobin’s, not his. He said he had looked into the case “out of my pure curiosity and to satisfy the many different people who came and asked about my opinion.”
As for Dr. Cogswell, Mr. King said, “I simply was not willing to spend 5,000 taxpayer dollars to get another report to say it’s suicide.”
The crime scene reconstructionist hired by the state agency, Jerry Findley, also took issue with the special prosecutor.
When Mr. King’s investigators came to talk to him, Mr. Findley said, “the whole tone of the interview was for me to tailor my report or soften my report to where it would be more conducive to suicide rather than homicide.”
In the prosecutor’s memo, investigators wrote that Mr. Findley had not considered the upside-down-gun theory.
“That’s a lie,” Mr. Findley said. “I did consider that, and like I told them, I ruled it out fairly fast,” because guns recoil after firing and the shells would have ejected in the opposite direction from where they were found.
That was affirmed in several tests conducted by Mr. Diaczuk.
Mr. King backs his investigators. “It’s not in his report that he ever test-fired the gun upside down,” he said in an interview. “You can’t predict necessarily where a shot shell is going to end up. You simply can’t.”
He also disputed firearms experts’ statements about the tactical light and the eye wound. “The recoil is essentially going to make the tactical light move forward into the face as opposed to away,” said the prosecutor, a former deputy sheriff. “That is also consistent with my years of training with firearms.”
For all that, Mr. King never explicitly stated that Ms. O’Connell had killed herself. He simply concluded that there was not sufficient evidence to bring charges.
The memo explaining his decision said that while the two witnesses who heard shouts and gunfire that night appeared credible, their testimony did not “support any type of homicide conviction on its own.”

In the interview with The Times, Mr. King said that looking at the evidence, “I think even you have to say it’s legitimately possible that she killed herself. And if that’s the case, I lose.”
In the end, he rejected the call for an inquest.
The Sheriff ReactsSheriff Shoar greeted the decision with gushing praise for Mr. King’s two investigators, Bill Gladson and John Tilley. In a letter to Mr. King, the sheriff described them as “class acts” and “on top of their game,” adding, “From one elected official to another, I would never try to recruit someone away from your office, but I did tell Bill and John that I may know of some decent real-estate deals in St. Johns County, just kidding of course.”

Sheriff David B. Shoar has admitted some flaws in his office’s investigation of Ms. O’Connell’s death, but he defends the conclusion that it was a suicide.
Kidding aside, with his political connections, ties to the business community and charming yet combative appeal, Sheriff Shoar was usually in a position to assert his will around the county.
“You’re talking about a tremendous amount of leverage that one man can wield in a Southern county, when you’re a sheriff,” said Ben Rich, a former law enforcement officer who served as the chairman of the county commission.
After starting as a St. Augustine police officer in 1981, Sheriff Shoar has been elected three times, twice unopposed. Challenging his authority is not without risk, Mr. Rich said.
“I confronted Sheriff Shoar in 2006 and 2007 when I was the chairman regarding his budget and the bloating of his budget,” Mr. Rich said, “and he declared war on me.” Mr. Rich was up for re-election at the time, and soon the sheriff began appearing in ads praising the experience of his 24-year-old opponent. Mr. Rich lost.
His hard edge notwithstanding, the sheriff has cultivated a somewhat eclectic persona. He is a leading member of an influential Christian prayer group that believes in spreading its gospel in government offices and schools. Well-versed in history and popular music, he is given to extemporaneous discourses that touch on the likes of Seneca and the Stoics, Keats, Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn and Stonewall Jackson.
When Mr. King decided not to prosecute Jeremy Banks, the sheriff saw it as vindication. Case closed.
A year later, after The Times began asking questions, he went on the offensive. He began a new inquiry — into how the state agency had investigated the shooting.
Citing The Times’s interest in the case, the sheriff had his office spend “hundreds of hours” combing through interviews conducted by Mr. Rodgers and his direct superior, Mark Brutnell.
In late March, Sheriff Shoar released a report that accused Mr. Rodgers of hyping his case against Mr. Banks, coaching witnesses and using false information to get a search warrant. The report, given to the news media and law enforcement officials, also accused Mr. Pape of failing to rein in his agent.
Sheriff Shoar also paid two former law enforcement officers — one of them an acquaintance — to review his report, and both agreed that Mr. Rodgers’s investigation had been flawed. Neither examined the underlying evidence or conducted independent interviews.
The sheriff’s report, filled with opinion and at times factually inaccurate, also sought to discredit the testimony of Mr. Banks’s two neighbors, who had given sworn statements about hearing a woman screaming for help.
One of them, Stacey Boswell, said in an interview that Mr. Rodgers had never sought to influence their testimony. “He just asked us what we seen, what we heard that night,” she said.
The report also said the women had confessed to investigators for the prosecutor’s office that they often smoked marijuana together in the evenings and could not remember if they had done so that night. The statement was underlined, in boldface type.

But in the interview, Ms. Boswell said, “That’s not true.” And Leanna Freeman, the lawyer for the second neighbor, said one of the investigators, Robert Hardwick, had confirmed that the women made no such admission.
Ms. Freeman said she asked Sheriff Shoar to correct his mistake, but he refused. (Mr. Hardwick declined to be interviewed.)
In his report, Sheriff Shoar did finally acknowledge — briefly — his department’s failure to canvass neighbors, interview the O’Connells, download Mr. Banks’s cellphone data, isolate and photograph Mr. Banks, collect all his clothing, send evidence for testing, interview the paramedics, write a crime scene log and file the proper reports.
The sheriff also questioned the decision to assign two “relatively inexperienced” detectives to “such a sensitive case.” (Just two months after the shooting, one of those detectives, Mr. Tolbert, was reprimanded for sexually harassing a female officer, records show.)
Despite the mistakes enumerated by the sheriff, only two midlevel supervisors were disciplined, and not seriously.
A Light TouchSheriff Shoar describes himself as a disciplinarian. “I have terminated, demoted, suspended and reprimanded many subordinates over the years,” he wrote in his letter to The Times.
At times, though, he has shown a light touch with wayward officers.
Three years before the O’Connell shooting, the sheriff’s office broke up a peaceful graduation party in a predominantly black neighborhood, firing pepper gas, unleashing a police dog, brandishing shotguns and making nine arrests. “If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was back in the ’60s — the only thing that was missing was a water hose,” said the party’s host, Charlie Gilliam.
Officers later filed a report saying that they were responding to a noise complaint, that they saw open bottles of alcohol, that bottles were thrown at them, and that the dog was unleashed after a young man pushed an officer.
But after internal affairs investigators determined that much of the report was fallacious, prosecutors dropped the charges, and residents received a $275,000 settlement. Sheriff Shoar, however, overruled his internal affairs department’s recommendation that the lieutenant in charge be suspended for three days and that an overly aggressive deputy with a history of misconduct be fired. In the following months, that deputy repeatedly engaged in misconduct before being dismissed.
As for the lieutenant, he would be the district commander on the scene the night Michelle O’Connell died.
A year before that, Sheriff Shoar’s disciplinary posture had been called into question in a domestic violence case involving a deputy named Halford (Bubba) Harris II.
Two supervisors learned of accusations that Mr. Harris had abused his wife. But no investigation was immediately opened, records show.
One sergeant did prepare an affidavit documenting the accusations. But he was told by his supervisor to hold it back, so he stuck it under the visor in his squad car, where it remained, even after another officer became aware of further incidents, according to Mr. Harris’s internal affairs file.
The case came to a head on Christmas Eve, when his wife fled their house and called the police. Internal affairs officers uncovered other possible acts of domestic violence before his hiring, records show. His wife said that before they married, he had held a knife to her throat and hit her. His ex-wife said he had threatened her with a gun. No charges were filed.
Col. Todd R. Thompson, the sheriff’s director of law enforcement, recommended that Mr. Harris be fired, saying his actions were “particularly egregious and trouble me deeply.”
In an interview, Mr. Harris insisted that he had never engaged in domestic abuse: “Is there proof?”
“They’re telling one story,” he added. “I’ll tell you another one.” He said the state attorney brought no charges and noted that, though they divorced after the Christmas Eve incident, his wife later wrote a letter of support, calling him “a wonderful man and father.”
Sheriff Shoar overruled the dismissal recommendation, citing mitigating factors, like an “exemplary” work record and an absence of citizen complaints.
“I hope you understand how fortunate you are to receive a second chance,” the sheriff wrote to his deputy.
After the decision leaked out and caused an uproar, Mr. Harris said, he was pressured to resign. He is now a deputy in a nearby county.
A Final ReckoningThree years after Michelle O’Connell’s death, the case continues to tear at her family.
Scott O’Connell recently made up with Mr. Banks and now accuses the state agency of manipulating his family into thinking his sister was murdered. After a long talk in April with Sheriff Shoar, which was transcribed and released to the public, Mr. O’Connell was rehired. He is no longer welcome in the family, his sister Jennifer says.
Patty O’Connell and her daughters, along with their brother Sean, continue to believe that Michelle did not kill herself.
“It’s unfair to my sister, to her memory, to her daughter and to my family,” Christine O’Connell said. “I still am hopeful that eventually, it may be 20 years, but eventually, we will have justice for my sister and for her daughter.”
Alexis O’Connell is 7 now. She and her grandmother recently moved to Virginia to live with the oldest O’Connell brother, Justin.
Jeremy Banks has declined to talk to The Times. “I’m not really sure that would be in Jeremy’s best interest,” said his lawyer, Robert L. McLeod.
Mr. Banks, who recently married, did acknowledge to investigators that there were questions he could not answer, such as why none of his DNA was found on his service weapon. “I know it’s got that plastic grip, and I’ve seen skin from my hand in there,” he said, according to his internal affairs file. “There should be DNA on there.” Or why neighbors said they heard screams followed by gunshots.
“Just because it raises questions doesn’t mean it happened that way,” Mr. Banks said.
The sheriff’s flawed investigation left many unanswered questions.
“It’s just simply the failure to collect evidence, and if it’s not collected at the beginning, chances are good it’s going to be lost,” said Thomas Cushman, a former prosecutor and longtime defense lawyer in town. “And if it’s lost, you can’t put it back together.”
Mr. King understands that there are questions, but he is firm in his decision not to prosecute.
“Yes, there is a visceral sense of ‘Oh, what if she was murdered and this guy goes free?’ ” he said. “There ought to at least be some visceral sense of ‘What if she did commit suicide and he’s in prison for the rest of his life?’ ”
Sheriff Shoar’s accusations have cast a long shadow on the state agency’s reputation. A spokeswoman said the agency would comment only after it completed its inquiry into the handling of the case by Mr. Rodgers, who is on paid leave, and Mr. Pape. A special prosecutor is also investigating.
The sheriff has not been hesitant to speak out. Over the summer, he held what amounted to a pep rally for Mr. Banks, attended by his staff, at the Renaissance World Golf Village Resort. Scott O’Connell and his wife were there as well. The sheriff introduced Mr. Banks’s parents, saying he had known them “for many, many, many years.”
“Jeremy Banks had nothing to do with that case,” he said, calling Mr. Banks and Mr. O’Connell “victims.” “I’d stake a 33-year career on it.”
He motioned to Mr. Banks and added, “This guy right here came so damn close to being charged with homicide, it’s scary.”
Then the sheriff asked Mr. Banks and Mr. O’Connell to stand. “Let’s give these two guys a hand.”

Produced by Nancy Donaldson, Mika Gröndahl, Xaquín G.V., Josh Keller, Jon Huang, Graham Roberts and Catherine Spangler.
Sarah Childress, Sarah Cohen and Rebecca R. Ruiz contributed reporting. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
Interview videos filmed by Frontline. Video of the scene by Phil Whitley.
Additional photography by Fred R. Conrad and Michael Appleton.

JFK

On Halloween, 1963, I dressed up as JFK. Some 22 days later he was murdered in Dallas.
I was six years old.
My father opined that JFK's murder was a conspiracy, and read every JFK conspiracy related book, including the Warren Commission report, after which he quizzed the eight top master seargeants in the 82nd Airborne Division, each of them a skilled marksman, each of whom agreed it was impossible for one shooter to make those shots.
In 1968, at age 11, RFK, my presidential candidate was murdered in Los Angeles.
In 1974, at age 17.5, I started a volunteer internship for Senator Ted Kennedy the day before my first classes at Georgetown University, eventually rising to the pay rate of $53/week, my first job.
Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of JFK's murder.
The conspirators have yet to be arrested, but there is no statute of limitations on homicide (not in civilized countries, anyway).
Yesterday, our Florida National Guard headquarters here in St. Augustine refused to fly its flag at half-staff, as directed by President Obama. Our Florida National Guard and Florida Governor Richard Scott are a "disgrace to the human race" in President Jimmy Carter's phrase.
As LBJ told Congress after Selma, "We SHALL overcome."
Stay tuned.

St. Johns County replacing illegal ATMS at Amphitheater, but they're still there today

Without a contract or request for proposal or any legal basis, St. Johns County has inflicted $3 ATMs on Amphitheater and Farmer's Market customers, with dogy banksters and the county raking in tens of thousands of dollars in illegal charges ever since the Amphitheater was rebuilt and reoopened in 2006.
Caught red-handed, the County Administration has issued an RFP and bid the contract. Soon there will be free ATMs. No more ripoffs of captive customers -- Amphitheater attendees and Farmer's Market customers.
It's our money.
Be sure to ask for refunds of the money you've spent.
Thanks to the county for listening (sometimes) and doing the right thing (sometimes).
Once again, we're making St. Augustine and St. Johns County safe from autocratic one-party Republican misrule.
Keep watching.

Expect Democracy: Nuclear Weapons Whistleblower Wins Union Presidency

Congratulations to Ed Bricker! My former Hanford, Washington whistleblower client just got elected President of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1765 in Olympia, Washington.

Now a bus driver, Mr. Bricker was the first whistleblower at the Department of Energy's Hanford, Washington nuclear weapons plant, once operated by Rockwell and Westinghouse. Corporate goons called Ed Bricker a "mole" because he provided information to Rep John Dingell, then-Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and its powerful Subcommittee on Invesigations. Interrogating those corporate thugs, goons and gumshoes in days of depositions was truly an honor.

USDOL OSHA investigator John Spear, then Assistant Administrator of oSHA in the Pacific Northwest, found that Bricker had been spied on illegally in retaliation for his protected activity.

Ralph Nader has half a chapter in his book on corporate lawyers about Mr. Bricker's case. (NO CONTEST: Corporate Lawyers and the Perversion of Justice in America)(1998).

In 2006, Ed Bricker published a letter defending me in the St. Augustine Record, after I was attacked by then-Mayor GEORGE GARDNER. Earlier, Bricker had defended me on the St. Augustine Record's "Talk of the Town" website, supporting my concerns about our City's illegal dumping. (He was then an environmental regulator for Washington State). As a result, Bricker was attacked unmercifully by the "Anonymice," with one falsely impersoanting Bricker's wife and others making threats.

Congratulations to Ed, Cindy and all the Brickers!

Encouraging Signs

Five decades ago, when Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote rabbis that St. Augustine was "the most lawless" city in America, the KKK ran this town and county. Secrecy and corruption prevailed.

Today, there is not a single KKK vote in either our City or County Commission.

Today, GLBT rights are protected by the cities of St. Augustine and St. Augustine Beach, the Sheriff, and Mosquito Control.

Today, secrecy and Sunshine violations are no longer tolerated.

Today, Democracy is "On the March," in David Lillienthal's words.

Yesterday, I spoke to our City and County Commissioners, meeting together, about the St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore, as I have since November 13, 2006 (see below). There was not one interruption. Not one hostile statement, whether from Commissioners or audience members. Not one comparison to Hitler, Goebbels, Communists or Nazis. No simulated gun noises and gun gestures. No uninformed comments about national parks or the federal government.

Our City and County still have a way to go. In particular, our County does. With your help, we're making this a better place.

Ex Mayor George Gardner Does It Again

Third generation politician, ex-GANNETT ("Chain Gang Journalism") Editor, ex-Mayor GEORGE GARDNER's latest newsletter on St. Augustine exhibits Babbitt-like bigotry against First Amendment Protected Activity by PBS and The New York Times.

This is not the first time GARDNER has attacked First Amendment rights.

In 2005, GARDNER was one of three Commissioners who vote aganst Rainbow flags on the Bridge of Lions, found to be a First Amendment violation by United States District Chief Judge Henry Lee Adams, Jr., who ordered the flags to be flown from June 8-13, 2005 for Gay Pride here (every other organization that ever asked was allowed to fly their flags, including the Broward Yacht Company and Flagler College).

In 2006, in his valdedictory speech as Mayor, GEORGE GARDNER attacked me for First Amendment protected activity, and was rihgtly exoriated by the St. Augustine Record on November 19, 2006 -- seven years ago today.

When GARDNER ceased to be Mayor, City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS put him on the payroll to write his newsletter, which he was already writing, making it in effect a City house organ.

In 2011, City Manager John Regan rightly cancelled GEORGE GARDNER's no-bid contract, one of many no-bid contracts that have been issued by local governments without local news coverage. (The notable exception was the no-bid helicopter contract, which "We the People" defeated and reversed, winning a full refund of our deposit).

In 2012, GEORGE GARDNER joined sixteen other local residents, including community activists, City Manager John Regan and me, riding together to Tallahassee February 14, 2012 to defeat FSDB's eminent dommain bill's threat to two historic neighborhoods, Nelmar Terrace and Fullerwood. Before the Florida State Senate K-12 Education Committee, GEORGE GARDNER was eloquent and helpful, for which we all granted him a plenary indulgence for all his past sins (see above).

Now, in 2013, GARDNER has inexplicably picked a fight with PBS and the New York TImes, archly entitling a short take "Not national publicity we want" (on the forthcoming Frontline story, "A Death in St. Augustine"). The show has not aired yet. It airs a week frm tonight. Questions and comments:
1. Who is "we?" (That snarky smirky mouse in King George's pocket?)
2. What is "want?"
3. The "want" here locally is the "want" of investigative journalism, ever since The Collective Press folded and ever since Folio Weekly editor Anne Schndler and went to First Coast News, no local print publication is investigating anything here in St. Augustine, Florida.
4. The "need" here is for the truth about those who occupy public offices, which Jefferson called "a public trust."
5. The lack of trust exhibited by GARDNER in the people is appalling -- he publicly denounced me for asking too many questions about illegal dumping in St. Augustine at the November 13, 2006 St. Augustine Ciy Commission meeting, leading the Record to defend me from GARDNER's defamation in a November 19, 2006 editorial, "Always important to stick to your guns."
6. Trust us. We deserve the truth. It's our money. It's our government.
7. Then-Mayor GEORGE GARDNER told me on February 24, 2006 that City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS had only dumped "clean fill" in our Old City Reservoir. It turned out to be 40,000 cubic yards of illegally dumped contaminted solid waste, dumped in defiance of St. Johns River Water Management District (SJRWMD) permit rules.
8. GEORGE GARDNER is a third-generation politician a "cognitive miser," one who "knows not that he knows not that he knows not." His insipid remarks about "A Death in St. Augustine" show that he does not want the truth about local institutions to be told. Pitiful.
9. After GLBT people here won a landmark U.S. District Court First Amendment victory, partly based on exposing the 1566 murder of a Gay man on orders of the First Governor of Florida, Pedro Menendez de Aviles, GARDNER opined that he only wanted to hear and have told "positive history" about St. Augustine.
10. You won't find any courses in "positive history" at any university. It figures that a blue-blood third generation politician from upstate New York -- and ex-GANNETT editor and ex-Mayor -- would have the chutzpa to emit such pompous public pronouncements and ukases. What do you reckon?

Sharp Elbows at FSDB

Ray Charles, Florida School for the Deaf and Blind (FSDB) and the U.S. Postal SErvice have the page one story in this morning's St. Augustine Record.

An FSDB alumni, Ray Charles' postage stamp was unveiled at FSDB yesteray. Local residents and elected officials were excluded from FSDB's and USDS' invitation-only event, which kicked our City and County's joint meeting on West Augusting infrastructure off the front page (and out of the newspaper entirely). Our City and County officials were blindsided and uninvited, and the USPS-FSDB Ray Charles stamp unveiling conflicted with the time of their joint meeting yesterday.

That's bad advance work and bad PR work by USPS.

That bad advance work and bad PR work by USPS is the seqelae of FSDB's preferences and invitation to USPS, which brandishes a bad attitude by FSDB. See below. USPS says it will come back for a public event, with the City of St. Augustine, early next year.

FSDB has a bully mentality, as evidenced by its buying up neighborhoing properties nad engaging in real estate speculation, while facing declining enrollments.

FSDB and its longtime board chair, Flagler College Chancellor WILLIAM L. PROCTOR, our erstwhile State Representative, showed their feckless thuggery by seeking eminent domain and seeking to preempt city zoning and planning laws. Active citizens helped halt their efforts. FSDB got a Pyrrhic victory: while FSDB got eminent domain, eminent domain is forbidden by law from ever being used in the Nelmar Terrance and Fullerwood neighborhoods of our Nation's Oldest City -- it is in the statute, and FSDB recorded this covenant in every single deed in those two historic St. Augustine neighborhoods.

Inspectors General and Ombuds Needed

As amply demonstrated by a raft of documents posted by Sheriff David Shoar on his website, concernng the death of a deputy's girlfriend, St. Johns County and St. Augustine need Inspectors General and Ombuds.

Government accountability requires it.

I have been advocating for creation of independent IGs and Ombuds offices since 2006. That was when we and FDEP caght WILLIAM B. HARRISS, then City Manager, red-handed. HARRISS dumped 40,000 cubic yards of solid waste in our Old City Reservoir. The County Code Enforcement office and County Sheriff refused to investigate HARRISS. HARRISS was never prosecuted or fined. In 2010, HARRISS resigned, going to work for the Sheriff, running his ST. JOHNS COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE FOUR STAR ASSOCIATION, INC., Sheriff Shoar's non-profit group.

The HARRISS-dumped contaminated solid waste was removed from the Old City Reservoir as a result of our community organizing and confronting HARRISS and AKERMAN SENTERFITT over their hare-brained scheme to return the solid waste to Lincolnville, where they proposed putting twelve feet of dirt on it and calling it a "park."

We won. The contaminated solid waste has been removed to a Class I landfill in Nassau County.

Yes we can!

The stench of the contaminated solid waste is gone, but the odor of corruption remains. We need Inspectors General and Ombuds here to assure accountability, starting with St. Johns County government, with oversight and investigation powers over the Sheriff, among others. That would require a County Charter, and a vote of the people. This time, let's do it right.

Quo vobis videtor?

Healing Continues

The healing continues, as yesterday's St. Augustine City Commission meeting with the County Commission showed.

Commissioners are considering how best to provide sewer service to West Augustine. It will cost some $20 million. Both the City and County will incur "losses" in complying with the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires equal protection. he City staff suggests the County might take over utilities, since t has a higher bonding capacity and the ability to obtain HUD Commmunity Development Block (CDBG) grants to help people afford sewer connection costs.

History of racism: No sewer service was provided anywhere in West Augustine until 1998 (the year our City Manager, John Patrick Regan, P.E., became Utilities Director). Racsts in our City sharply questioned r. Regan then -- and have muted criticism now -- at the "costs." The costs of not having sewer service include death, disease and depressed property values. Failure of the ancien regime to provide equal services a was a flagrant violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Racism in our City is why most of West Augustine has no sewer service. To remedy that scourge of racistm, yesterday our St. Augustine City Commissioners voted to spend some $265,000 on the first next step -- sewer service for the intersection of Volusia and West King. The vote was unanimous.

But a few minutes earlier, Commissioner Donald W. Crichlow essentialy said he wanted to ask people if they wanted higher utility bills to pay for expanding sewer service to African-American homes. That's an unenlightened question, one inviting civil rights litigation for violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

As City Manager John Regan rightly responded to Commissioner Crichlow, West Augustine sewer service has been discussed at dozens of City meetings, and no one has ever objected to paying in our bills to bring sanitary sewers to the African-American community so long neglected by St. Augustine during the time of Jim Crow segregation, de facto and de jure.

With sewer service at that intersection, the likelihood increases of Florida Memorial University (formerly Floridal Normal School) returning to St. Augustine with a branch campus here on land it still owns. FMU moved to its campus in Miami Lakes in 1968, after being hounded by segregationists here. After the anti-segregation protests here in 1964, FMU was made to feel unwelcome, financially, physically and psychologically, in the worst tradition of the KKK's "Unwelcome Wagon."

West Augustine, once thriving with small businesses fueled by spending from the college, professors, students and staff, withered.

Meanwhile, our racist State of Florida Department of Transportation refused to locate an I-95 interchange to serve West King Street, further withering West Augustine. These were intentional acts of the racist power structure.

We look forward to Florida Memorial University coming back. We look forward to West Augustine coming back.

As Lyndon Johnson said, "We SHALL overcome."

Let the healing continue....

Not so fast on relocating two Anastasia Island Fire Stations

Yesterday's joint meeting of the St. Augustine City Commission and St. Johns County Commission included discussion of hte possibility of a joint fire staton, to be located on SR 312 on Anastasia Island. While we appreciate their saving money, response time would increase by two mnutes or more for thousands of residents living on Anastasia Island.

Commissioner Leanna Freeman, Donald Crichlow and Vice Mayor Nancy Sikes-Kline are right to question the proposal.

Worse, it appears the proposal is motivated by the desire of St. Johns County to sell the exsting fire and rescue staton (located by the St. Augustine Beach Pier) to developer-speculator-conmen.

Worse still, the name of PIERRE THOMPSON, grandson of hte founder of the St. Augustine Record was menioned as a motivating factor, in noting that THOMPSON owns the entire south side of SR 312, and future growth and developments will occur there.

City Attorney RONALD WAYNE BROWN, along with former City Attorney GEOFFREY DOBSON, were THOMPSON's lawyers for some thirty years. THOMPSON is most noted for throwing his weight around, and nearly escaping federal criminal charges involving his cutting down a bald eagle nest tree. After the Fish and Wildlife Service criminal investigators performed a criminal incvestigation, our lapdog Bush-era U.S. Attorney nearly covered it up. We reported on it in the Collective Press, resulting in a criminal information being filed, and THOMPSON BROTHERS REALTY pleading guilty, agreeing to pay one third of a million dollars and to provide sixteen (16) acres of land to the government. (In East Texas and elsewhere, THOMPSON would have been incracercarted for molestng a bald eagle).

City Attorney RONALD WAYNE BROWN should recuse himself from this and any other matter affecting THOMPSON's interests, to avoid any appearance of impropriety.

Firemen fight fires and provide life-saving to heart attack and accident victims.

Moving two firehouses away from the population to curry favor with developers is not in their job description.

I read the excellent critique by the union local representing our St. Augustine firemen: I am favoraby impressed. Every single one of their questions and concerns must be asked and answered in a public hearing (no time imits, please). Lives are at stake here.

Moving the fire staton to SR 312 is contary to the public interest. Thank you, Commissioners Freeman, Crichlow and Sikes-Kline for asking questions.

St. Augustine City Commission and St. Johns County Commmission to Hold "Joint" (Concurrent) Meeting

The first agenda distributed by our Nation's Oldest City had no public comment listed. Typo? That's been corrected.
The "joint" City-County Commission meeting commences at 9 AM at our City Hall and Lightner Museum, 75 King Street, on Monday, November 18, 2013.
Ask questions.
Make disclosures.
Expect democracy.
Work ceaselessly to establish the St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore.
Decisions get made by those who show up.
Show up.
Be there.
And if you can't, watch on cable channel 3 or on streaming video on the Internet.
Aloha!

Ray Charles Postage Stamp Unveiling Update

Over on the local rigt-wing political machine's hate website masqueradng as "Historic City News" there was a press release from the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, announcing an invitation only event on Monday with the U.S. Postal Service.
The event: USPS unveiling a postage stamp for Ray Charles, f/k/a Ray Charles Robinson, the African-American singer whom Frank Sinatra called "the only true genius" in American music.
Ray Charles spent eight years in St. Augustine as an FSDB student.
FSDB excluded our City from the event. FSDB didn't invite anyone with the City.
How exclusionary! That's Apartheid, FSDB-style.
FSDB administration bitterly resents our City government, and planned the event to take place during the City-County workshop on Monday morning, November 17, 2013 See story below.
So yesterday, I telephoned the Postmaster General's office and USPS Inspector General's Congressional Liaison, and spoke with the USPS Corporate Comunications Director for the South and Southeast. I explained to USPS our City's history of racism the advances we've made in recovering from it. I asked for an event to be open to everyone in our City (unlike FSDB's snooty, invitation-only event, announced only on the aforementioned hate site). USPS agreed. USPS will be in touch with St. Augustine, with an eye toward having a public event, with music by Ray Charles, performed by blind students, hopefully in January to coincide with the opening of the City's six month long Jounrey exhibit on our 450 years of African-American experience.
Thank you, USPS.
Thank you, USPS for seeing through FSDB and helping us continue the heeling.
Thank you for helping uncover the heels at FSDB, and their works and pomps.
As my mother would say, "Time wounds all heels."
Now: wasn't that was a sharp elbow FSDB aimed at our City, our residents, our leaders and our City staff? No one in our City government knew about the USPS event. None were invited. Maybe we need a concurrent meeting of the FSDB Board of Directors with the St. Augustine City Commission to discuss matters of mutual concern (and FSDB's being a bad neighbor).
We should all forgive FSDB administrators, whose lack of sensitivity is still noticeable, and still embarassing. Our residents and City leaders prevailed, FSDB did not get its eminent domain land-grabbing bill without being totally watered down. The result: our historic Nelmar Terrace and Fullerwood neighborhoods will never again be assailed.
Thus, FSDB invited USPS for an event and excluded the entire African-American community, all of our residents, and our City leaders.
How cool is that?
With a few phone calls, anything is possible in life. On January 20, 1961, President John F. Kennedy noticed there were no African-Americans in the Coast Guard contingnent at his Inaugural Parade.
None.
Zilch.
Nada.
JFK told Harris Wofford (later a U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania) to do something. Harris Wofford picked up the telephone and the Coast Guard was desegregated. Over and done. He told his colleagues in the new President's office, "You can do anything with these telephones."
Quo vobis videtor? (That's Latin for "what dew yew reckon?")

IN HAEC VERBA: StAugustGreen Testimony to St. Johns County Legislative Delegation on St. Augustine National Histrocial Park and National Seashore Legislation

STATEMENT OF STAUGUSTGREEN(TM),
BEFORE THE ST. JOHNS COUNTY LEGISLATIVE DELEGATION ON:
ST. AUGUSTINE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK AND NATIONAL SEASHORE
NOVEMBER 12, 2013

Chairman Hutson, Senator Thrasher, Representative Renuart:

StAugustGreenTM supports the creation of a St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore. See www.staugustgreen.com.

Our National Parks are truly “America's Best Idea,” as Ken Burns' acclaimed PBS series established, quoting Wallace Stegner. With your help, we can and will help preserve, protect and expand our National Parks, which help create more than 6.5 million American jobs.

In 1939, the St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore Act was introduced during the 76th Congress, supported by then-Mayor Walter Fraser, introduced by then-Representative Joseph Hendricks and then-Senators Charles Andrews and Claude Pepper to conserve this wonderfully unique place. That was 74 years ago. What exactly are we waiting for? St. Augustine deserves its rightful place. St. Augustine's story is our Nation's story. Diverse people lived, learned from each other and prospered here since 1565. Our Nation's oldest continually-occupied, European-founded City, St. Augustine has a rich history of cultural diversity – America's original melting pot since 1565. Many never learn this in schools, where British-centrism prevails. The story of the United States began in St. Augustine on September 8, 1565: the 800 colonizers included the first Hispanic-Americans, first African-Americans (freed and slave), first Catholics, first Jews and first women from Europe, along with many other firsts in what is now the United States. That was 42 years before Jamestown,Virginia and 55 years before Plymouth, Massachusetts. University of Florida History Professor Michael Gannon says, “When Jamestown was founded, St. Augustine was already up for urban renewal.”

Europe's bloody religious wars were fought here: Spanish, French and English forces fought for hegemony in St. Augustine Northeast Florida. Europeans killed Europeans here, over dogma and which empire would rule. Our Matanzas River (“slaughters”) is named for one September 1565 event, where 270 Frenchmen were put to the sword. No monument to their memories exists in Florida. Likewise, the “Columbian Exchange” began here, with Native American and Europeans first interacting, sharing and fighting for dominance. No proper interpretation or monument to this remarkable exchange currently exists.

St. Augustine is a very special place and deserves protection: it was America's first in so many ways: we had the first Catholic Mass and first Thanksgiving feast (both on September 8, 1565). St. Augustine had America's first town plan (1586), first school, first church, first weddings, first baptisms, first hospital, first forts, first public square, first public market, first paved streets, first park, first system of weights and measures, first cattle, first horses, first pigs, first government with written records, first army and navy, first recorded marriages (including African-Americans), first freed slave communities, first African-American soldiers/sailors, first African-American general and first government anti-Gay hate crime (on Governor's orders in 1566).

St. Augustine residents' courageous activism and litigation produced landmark Congressional and federal court Civil Rights and First Amendment victories (including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and a series of landmark 1963-71 federal court public accommodations and school desegregation orders, a series of orders vindicating the rights of artists and entertainers (buskers) in St. Augustine's historic area, and a 2005 court order for Rainbow flags on historic Bridge of Lions in honor of GLBT history, including the Governor's ordering the 1566 murder of a Gay French translator of the Guale Indian language). While the Spanish Inquisition was here to a small degree, Spanish governors in St. Augustine never burned a single “witch” (unlike Salem, Massachusetts counterparts). St. Augustine was a small garrison town that beat the odds, surviving continuously since 1565, when other European settlements were swiftly abandoned (including the 1607 British settlement of Jamestown).

The Underground Railroad began in St. Augustine in 1687. Under Spanish rule, St. Augustine grew into America's first shining bulwark of freedom – the first Underground Railroad ran south to St. Augustine, starting in 1687, as Spain granted freedom to any British slaves who would become Catholics and fight for Spain. Slave revolts resulted in several British colonies upon slaves hearing the news of freedom in St. Augustine, Florida. The British were furious, as their former slaves settled here in 1738 the first freed slave settlement in America, at Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mosé (Fort Mosé). The British attacked St. Augustine in 1740, besieging it for 27 days. Spanish-freed slaves and Spanish soldiers fought off British invaders.

Hundreds of British indentured servants fled to freedom in 1777. During the 20-year British period, Menorcans, Greeks and Italians, who were British “indentured servants” (slaves by contract), fled to St. Augustine from the deadly failed mosquito-infested New Smyrna indigo plantations, “voting with their feet,” walking some 70 miles to freedom in St. Augustine in 1777. Their long walk to freedom deserves a National Historical Park, which can happen with state donation of several current state parks along the route they walked from New Smyrna to St. Augustine in 1777 – this should include wonderful bird and other wildlife observation points in three counties, already state parks. Imagine more than 130,000 acres of NPS protected land, at the stroke of a pen, including state parks along this freedom walk.

St. Augustine survived genocide, wars, arson, slavery, and segregation – and is the Oldest European-founded City in America about to observe its 450th birthday. St. Augustine survived and outlasted slavery, genocide of Native Americans (the Timucua tribe ceased to exist), Jim Crow segregation, hurricanes and the British, who thrice burned St. Augustine to the ground (1586, 1668 and 1702) and twice besieged it (1702 and 1740). Continental America's oldest masonry fort – Castillo de San Marcos – was started in 1672 in response to British arson and completed in 1695. The Castillo survived two British sieges and cannonballs with its its unique porous coquina shell construction and artisans' nightly masonry work restoring sections blown away by day. Great Britain owned St. Augustine for twenty years under the two Treaties of Paris, with two peaceful transition to British and back to Spanish rule in 1763 and 1784. Likewise, St. Augustine survived the Civil War without a single shot – in 1861, an Army sergeant turned over the Castillo's keys (Fort Marion), obtaining a receipt from the Confederates. In 1862, Confederates left peaceably when the U.S. Navy (with U.S. Marines) were sighted offshore. The fort was used as a military prison until the Spanish-American War in 1898 – it was a prison for selected American Revolutionary War patriots during the British period, and then for selected Native Americans (Osceola and fellow Seminole warriors; Kiowa; Apaches, including members of Geronimo's band and several of his wives) under the U.S. Army. The U.S. Government's controversial system of Indian boarding schools began right here at the Castillo, and was expanded to dozens of other sites around America. These schools are rightly deserving of NPS interpretation beyond that which was traditionally available at the Castillo.

Slavery began in St. Augustine, Florida on September 8, 1565 – not in Virginia in 1607, as often misreported. Jim Crow segregation was ended by what happened here in 1964, through the courage of local residents and visiting supporters -- the “St. Augustine Movement.” This history deserves NPS interpretation.
In 1964, St. Augustine's 400th anniversary was marred by KKK segregationists, allied with local law enforcement: their fury at peaceful Civil Rights protesters helped President Johnson break the U.S. Senate filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.   The “St. Augustine Movement” was led by local African-American dentist Dr. Robert B. Hayling. Dr. Hayling brought Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jackie Robinson. Here. The “St. Augustine Movement” saw the largest arrest of rabbis in American history, the Monson Motel swim-ins, St. Augustine Beach ocean wade-ins, the beating of Rev. Andrew Young and the arrest of Dr. King and the mother of Massachusetts' Governor Endicott Peabody. This was all daily national news.

White House tapes show that in dealing with Southern Senators, President Lyndon Johnson was empowered by the courage of “St. Augustine Movement” as much as by the nightly revolting images and page one headlines of St. Augustine beatings, shootings, muriatic acid poured into the Monson Motel pool, and an iconic photo of a policeman jumping into that pool to arrest J.T. Johnson, Al Lingo, Mamie Ford Jones, Peter Shiras and others for swimming there. After federal court rulings, state law enforcement (Highway Patrol and Fish and Game Commission, supervised by courageous State's Attorney Dan Warren) finally came to defend African-Americans, including those swimming in Atlantic Ocean amid wade-ins. Jim Crow segregation ended because of all that had happened in St. Augustine, Florida.

On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Today, women, racial and ethnic minorities, persons with disabilities and Gay and Lesbian people are protected thanks to the courage of the St. Augustine Movement – the 1964 Civil Rights Act was the precedent for human rights laws worldwide. Some of our St. Augustine neighbors who protested in 1964 survive: our elders are sharing their wisdom with future generations and working with Rev. Andrew Young, et. al on several different Civil Rights museums, including the former dental office of Dr. Robert B. Hayling.

Rev. Andrew Young said it best back in 1964: “We change history through finding the one thing that can capture the imagination of the world. History moves in leaps and bounds.”

Next year, in 2014, America and St. Augustine will honor the 50th anniversary of our1964 Civil Rights Act. Would this be the first National Seashore with a Civil Rights component? Under Florida laws at the time, the Atlantic Ocean was segregated under Jim Crow segregation.  Protest wade-ins at St. Augustine Beach pier were international news.  Today, formerly segregated African-American beaches statewide are in need of protection, including Bethune-Volusia Beach (near New Smyrna Beach), Virginia Key (Miami) and Bunche Beach (near Fort Myers). DOI must appreciate the urgency of preserving this history, including potential NPS status and protection and possible sequential referral legislation denying flood insurance to anyone destroying their historic homes?

St. Augustine's Native American, Hispanic, Roman Catholic, Jewish, African-American and Civil Rights history deserves greater respect from DoI. As Admiral Hyman Rickover once said to President Jimmy Carter (then a recent Naval Academy graduate: “Why not the best?” Why not a public-private partnership to present St. Augustine's diverse history to the world? How about planning with Hispanic-Americans, Native Americans, African-Americans and other diverse groups with NPS for the 450th? .

A much better location for an NPS Visitor Center might be the abandoned “Sebastian Inner Harbor” project, where boat docks have already been built before the project was abandoned. This property is in foreclosure. Imagine a DOI-staffed public-private partnership – a National Civil Rights Museum – bordering on the San Sebastian River, site a currently bankrupt development, symbolizing “waters that run like justice” working waterfront, with shrimp boats (not unlike Tarpon Springs' sponge docks), with artists and entertainers (buskers) as in Key West's Mallory Square, with outdoor restaurants.

Currently, Native American, Hispanic, African-American and Civil Rights history is not given nearly enough attention in St. Augustine, either by NPS, or by anyone else.

We treasure our wonderful jewel of a 1672-95 Spanish fort, our Castillo de San Marcos – one of our most-frequently visited but most interpretation-deprived locations in the entire National Park Service. There is also the sister fort of Fort Matanzas. There is also Fort Mosé State Park (underfunded state park threatened with closure), the site of first free black settlement in 1738). There is also a lone historical marker in St. Augustine Beach for beach wade-ins. There is a Civil Rights Foot Soldiers monument and an Andrew Young memorial in St. Augustine's Historic Slave Market square, where abolitionist and transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson first observed slave-selling in 1827 (with multitasking by the chair of the Bible Society and a slave auction being conducted in the public market across St. George Street). There is a small community history museum in Lincolnville. That is all there is at the present time.

Like Atlanta's Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. sites, St. Augustine deserves NPS ranger interpretation of African-American and civil Rights history at Fort Mosé, the Slave Market and the churches and homes of Lincolnville and West Augustine (where Civil Rights heroes lived, worked and planned peaceful protests). This will make history come alive, inspiring generations of future Americans to respect equality and the people who struggled to attain it.

The King and Queen of Spain are coming to St. Augustine in 2014. Now, more than ever, St. Augustine's key role in U.S. and world history deserves greater National Park Service attention.
St. Augustine's wonderful natural beauty likewise deserves National Park Service protection.

With all this history and beauty, St. Augustine currently has two relatively small National Park Service installations – Castillo de San Marco National Monument (20.5 acres) and Fort Matanzas National Monument (some 300 acres). We can do better for future generations. With wise gifts of state and local public lands and wise stewardship by NPS and local residents, we will create a St. Augustine National Seashore. We will help protect against beach erosion and flooding, protecting glorious wetlands and beaches and private property.

We will protect the winter calving (baby-rearing) grounds of the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale (some 300 survive), endangered turtles' nesting grounds, and habitats of bald eagles, beach mice, butterflies and other endangered and threatened wildlife for future generations to enjoy. We will rescue historic lands threatened by “Temple Destroyers” (in John Muir's words).

Wrecking balls have already destroyed some of our history, including a 3000-4000 year old Native American Indian archaeological site just south of St. Augustine (destroyed to build a strip malls and condominiums). Florida is already blessed with some 500,000 unsold condominiums. St. Augustine is a national treasure, which must not be destroyed by mindless speculation and endless high rises, like South Florida.

These lands must be protected and not neglected – state parks and forests, water management district land, and county beaches, including Anastasia State Park and the Guana-Tolomato-Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve (GTM-NERR) – will be combined into a National Historical Park and National Seashore in two counties, one that will preserve at least 130,000 acres of beach and uplands, rescuing them from threats: closing or privatizing of our parks, e.g., with golf courses (Florida is already blessed with some 1200 golf courses, thank you, and some of those are failing financially). Every year since 2006, our St. Johns County Legislative Delegation has heard us, and talked about the St. Augustine National Historical Park and Seashore – our state legislators now know that we can save tens of millions of dollars by giving selected state lands to the National Park Service. Please see attached 2011 column from St. Augustine Underground (formerly published by Milwaukee Journal).

The St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore will help interpret American history that is too often neglected in our schools, including Hispanic, African-American, Native American and Civil Rights history. We have 11,000 years of Native-American history. NPS needs to do a better job of telling it, especially in St. Augustine, where ethnocentrism was long on display at the Castillo, where Native Americans were imprisoned in the 1800s.

St. Augustine has 500 years of European and African: history: a unique, multi-cultural blend of Spanish, Roman Catholic, African-American, Jewish, Greek Orthodox, Protestant, French, Menorcan, Greek, Italian, Irish, Haitian, Cuban, Civil War, Flagler-era, Civil Rights, Military, Nautical, Resort, Artistic and Musical history. Ray Charles and Marcus Roberts learned to play music in St. Augustine, at our Florida School for the Deaf and Blind. Many jazz musicians retire and play here.

Our local economy is still in the ditch. People are still hurting. Stores and restaurants are vacant. Several popular chain and local restaurants have closed their doors forever. Tourism is the engine of our economy. Environmental and historic tourists stay twice as long and spend twice as much, and they teach future generations of Americans to appreciate nature and understand our history. St. Augustine is rated as one of the best places to live, with the best schools, one of the best places to to retire, one of the most cultured places in Florida (Women's Day), hosts one of the ten best Christmas light displays in the world (National Geographic), and is one of 20 places in the world to see in 2013 (National Geographic).

With National Park Service branding, our City can recover from the Great Recession, just as recovered in past centuries, after hurricanes, British sieges, cannonballs and city-wide arson.
U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Ronald Chairman Wyden said February 19, 2013 at Hanford, Washington's “B” Reactor, “there is an old saying that those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it.... My own view is that history isn't always ideal .... it is important to look deep into the well of history to get a clearer understanding of what lies ahead." Sen. Wyden said Hanford and other Manhattan Project sites “must be preserved so future generations understand what went on here.” He said last year was the first in decades Congress hadn't protected our “special places.”

It is time to discuss the St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore. Our draft legislation was called “perfect” by one of our former City Commissioners, who worked at the CEQ and DoI under Presidents Clinton and Bush. This was after a NPS attorney in 2009 refused to read our draft, while inaccurately writing that this would be criminal, misciting 18 U.S.C. 1913.

In 2011, the DoI Solicitor's office incorrectly took the position that the 450th Commission is an “operating committee,” which is not true. The Commission is not operating anything. A junior DoI attorney wrote the letter at the behest of Deanna Archuletta, then a DoI political appointee, who was attempting to justify her desire for secrecy with a slogan. Since that time, DoI has been violating the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) by having the 450th Commission conduct h conference calls and a secret meeting in South Florida. Enough secrecy. Enough delay. Government openness and accountability are essential in our democracy, and DoI must appreciate that fact.

Please ask DOI to agree to full FACA compliance for the 450th Commission, including public meetings announced in advance with meaningful public participation and court reporter transcription (as took place at the first and only public 450th Commission meeting in St. Augustine on July 18, 2011). During that meeting, I requested that the Commission hear a presentation on the St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore. The audience applauded. The presentation has not yet been scheduled. The 450th Commission needs to get moving. Again, what are we waiting for?

From now on, DoI staff must open their hearts to our community, end their FACA violations and start helping St. Augustine plan for 2014 and 2015 and beyond – public participation is essential, as one of our former mayors has urged. Please ask Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell about public participation, and revive the moribund federal 450th Commission.

CONCLUSION

Thank you for helping St. Augustine, Florida win the respect she deserves from NPS and DoI. As Albert Camus said, “If you don't help us do this, then who else in the world will help us do this?”

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, in an ad lib speech on July 18, 2011, came close to endorsing the St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore, referring to “your National Parks here” Let's make it a reality. Secretary Salazar said St. Augustine is “one of our Creator's most special places,” and that its contributions to history need to be made “known to our Nation and the world – that history is important to tell.”

StAugustGreenTM respectfully urges you to support St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore. www.staugustgreen.com By enacting the St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore legislation, we will conserve, preserve and protect nature, property and history, right wrongs, promote healing and teach tolerance.  Our work is bipartisan, and will create another “public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” as Congress wrote in establishing Yellowstone National Park on March 1, 1872 – 131 years ago.

Will you please support “America's Best Idea” – a St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore – the best “legacy project” for the 500th anniversary of Spanish Florida (2013), 450th anniversary of St. Augustine (2015) and 50th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (2014)?What can you do? Floridians are prepared to offer up some of our current state parks, forests and water management district lands for the St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore
“Why not the best?” Let us invest in “America's Best Idea.”
Thank you.

Respectfully submitted,
ED SLAVIN
StAugustGreenTM.
www.staugustgreen.com
PO. Box 3084, St. Augustine, Florida 32085-3084
904-377-4998
EASlavin@aol.com

One Attachment:(St. Augustine Underground column, formerly published by Milwaukee Journal).

The Unwelcome Wagon, I: U.S. Postal Sevice Unveils Ray Charles Stamp in Tiny Hall on Closed Campus

Blind musician Ray Charles Robinson, a/k/a "Ray Charles," went to school in St. Augustine, at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, from 1937-1945. Ray Charles learned to play music here in St. Augustine, Florida.

Ray Charles is getting a United States postage stamp. It will be unveiled Monday, November 18, 2013, at the closed, gated, security-patrolled campus of the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, by invitation only, in a tiny hall. You will have to watch it all on streaming video, unless you are invited.

Billy Joel said Ray Charles was "more important than Elvis Presley." Ray Charles helped to desegregate the music industry. Frank Sinatra said Ray Charles was "the only true genius in show business." At Monday's stamp unveiling, blind student musicians in the acclaimed FSDB group called "Outta Sight" will perform Ray Charles' music, including "Georgia on my mind," "Hit the road Jack" and Charles' arrangement of "America the beautiful," before a nearly all-white invited audience.

Pitiful. Embarassing. What a travesty

Among the uninvited are local African-American leaders and average citizens, who were welcomed at an April 3, 2013 postage stamp unveiling for the 500th anniversary of Spanish Florida. Why?

Ask African-American U.S. Representative Corinne Brown (D-Jacksonville), or Flagler College Chancellor and former FSDB Chair William L. Proctor(our former Republican State Representative), who are among those who are invited. The rest can watch on streaming video. On the Internet. In front of your computer. How heart-warming.

Unable to attend the 10 AM unveiling will be five (5) St. Augustine City Commissioners and five (5) St. Johns County Commissioners. Why? They will be, at the precise hour of the unveiling, working on the people's business at a joint city-county workshop being held in the St. Augustine City Commission chambers, 75 King Street.

This is lousy advance work on the part of the U.S. Postal Service. Utterly inept and inane. Bigoted, eltist and wrong.

The late Attorney General and U.S. Senator Robert Francis Kennedy would sometimes ask his best advance man, Jerry Bruno, in the face of inept scheduling, "Who advanced this trip, Bruno?" I have called the Congressional affairs officer of the Inspector General, U.S. Postal Service, and asked essentially that question.

Robert Kennedy would often say to his staff, whenever he screwed up: "Don't tell me what I should have done, tell me what I should do NOW."

TO USPS: USPS must NOW schedule a second Ray Charles postage stamp unveiling here in St. Augustine, make it a public event, hold it at Flagler College Auditorium, if available, and do it on the afternoon of Monday November 18, 2013. Otherwise, a Civil Rights complaint may be filed with the U.S. Postal Service and Florida Human Relations Commission.

As you can see, the Apartheid-style unveiling of the Ray Charles postage stamp here in St. Augustinne is a Public Relations Disaster, a possible civil rights violation, and a slap in the face and a heavy-handed insult to the people and public officials of St. Augustine, Florida and St. Johns County.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once called St. Augustine "the most lawless city in America." We're recovering from that. We're trying to heal ancient wounds here. We don't need bad PR from the Postal Service to rub salt in those wounds, do we?

Postscript: Spoke to the USPS Congressional Affairs officer, who referred me to the Postmaster General's office -- working to have a second stamp unveiling Monday where our citizens and City and County Commissioners can attend.

The Unwelcome Wagon, II: St. Johns County Board of County Commissioners, Visitory and Convention Bureau (VCB) and Tourist Development Council (TDC)

The non-bid contract of the St. Johns County Visitor and Convention Bureau, Inc. (VCB) with St. Johns County Board of County Commissioners SJC BCC) expired September 30, 2013. Good riddance. The Contract must be re-bid.

Meanwhile, bigoted, provincial VCB is still in business, and apparently still purporting to "represent" St. Johns County. It and its putative "partner," the St. Johns County Tourist Development Council (TDC), adamantly refuse to provide a list of GLBT-friendly accomodations to tourists (or me). There is no friendliness to GLBT people expressed by our Board of County Commissioners, which has no nondiscrimination policy.

Meanwhile, outside of our bigoted BCC, the following local government entities have non-discrimination policies:

1. Anastasia Mosquito Control District of St. Johns County (employment).
2. Sheriff David Shoar (employment)
3. State's Attorney Ralph Joseph Larizza (employment)
4. City of St. Augustine Beach (employment and housing)
5. City of St. Augustine (housing)
6. St. Johns County Schools (harassment, bullying and civility)

Meanwhile, the following entities are considering changes:
7. Town of Hastings
8. Supervisor of Elections
9. Tax Collector

On Monday, November 18th, the St. Johns County Commission will hold a joint workship, with public comment, with the St. Augustine City Commission. Ask questions. Demand answers. Ask County Commissioners why we're not advancing GLBT tourism. Bigotry is bad for business. Does the Ku Klux Klan still run St. Johns County Board of County Commissioners? Or do they need spinal and testicular implants to overcome their strange romance with the Tea Party and KKK?

Notably, VCB's inept tourism marketing is not doing enough to recruit Hispanic, African-American, Civil Rights, Historic, Environmental, Youth and GLBT tourists.

It's our money.

Let's cross-examine the bigoted burghers who won't protect GLBT rights and show ineptitude and decrepitude in tourism marketing, preferring to waste money on advertising in Reader's Digest and Better Homes and Garden, and eschewing advertisements in Miami, in African-American and GLBT publications.

St. Augustine is a cool hip place, which one would never figure out reading the dull-as-dishwater tourism brochures from the all-white VCB and TDC, which have no civil rights and antitrust compliance policies and produce tourist brochers unadorned by Rainbow flags, African-American history, Native Americans and any acknowledgement that this is the place where the first Hispanics, Catholics, Africans, Jews and families from Europe founded the first colony.

Why? It appears that the legacy of bigotry -- being extirpated in St. Augustine -- lives on in St. Johns County.

Veterans Day

On Veterans Day, we honor veterans, including my late father. My father volunteered the Army the day after Pearl Harbor, joining the 82nd Airborne Division, making three combat jumps, the last in Normandy at 1 AM on D-Day. He was wounded in the knee with Nazi shrapnel, hospitalized, with shrpnel in his knee until he died.

Today on Veterans' Day we remember our veterans' sacrifices, hoping and praying they were not in vain.

My dad never believed the Warren Commission report on the JFK murder. In 1964, he asked the eight top marksmen in the 82nd if they could have made the shot Oswald allegedly made -- every one of them said no. Dad read all of the books he could on the JFK murder, and often spoke on radio about the fact that there had to have been a conspiracy, it being impossible for one man to have fired those bullets.

Today, only a quarter of Americans believe the Warren Commission report, and some 75% agree with my dad that there was a conspiracy to murder JFK.

To honor my dad,who was relentless in pursuit of truth, the South Jersey Chapter of the 82nd Airborne Divn. Assn. is named for my dad, the Edward A. Slavin Chapter.

Today, documents on the JFK murder are still being held, while our government spies on us in violation of our Fourteenth Amendment rights. Enough.

In the words of Senator Albert Gore, Sr. on Election Night 1970, "The truth shall rise again."

75 Years After Kristallnacht

In Nazi Germany, 75 years ago tonight, the Nazis aimed coordinated attacks at Jewish synagogues, schools, homes and businesses, setting fires and breaking glass and killing and rounding up people to be imprisoned. No fire trucks came -- this Kristallnacht was an instrument of national policy. The world said little. Millions died as a result.

In his book, "Earth in the Balance," Al Gore in 1992 compared the world's silence in the face of environmental problems to both a dysfunctional family and Kristallnacht, quoting Sir Winston Spencer Churchill about entering a "period of consequences."

We're fixin' to enter a "period of consquences."

Tonight, we contemplate a world in which too many good people still do little to nothing in the face of oppression, where good people are afraid to speak out against evil, where they fear "I will get in trouble." Such is the root of madnnes, and oppression. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, "The only thing we have to fear is ---fear itself."

We must do better, we can do better nad we will do better.

Avoiding Conflicts of Interest in the City of St. Augustine Beach, Florida

City of St. Augustine Beach City Commissioners need to learn from their sister ciCity about avoiding conflicts of interests. Where there's a conflict of interest or an appearance of imropriety, they need to recuse themselves from voting or speaking. Some of them understand -- Commissioner Andrea Samuels recused herself on an a request for $5000 for the A1A Scenic Highway nonprofit (her husband is board chair).

Some of them don't get it though.


On Monday, November 4, 2013, DOUGLAS BURNETT, the City of St. Augustine Beach Ciy Attorney, sat silently while two (2) of five (5) City Commissioners engaged in a colloquy about a proposed alcohol control ordinance affecting their businesses. BRUD HELHOSKI and Vice Mayor RICHARD O'BRIEN are directly affected. HELHOSKI owns Jacks's Barbeque and O'BRIEN et ux own motels.

On final passage next month, neither HELHOSKI nor O'BRIEN should vote.
The City Attorney (a developer lawyer and son of the former Commanding General of the Florida National Guard) needs to speak out and tell them to leave the dais when discussing an ordinance that affects their own pecuniary interests.

Never again!

By he way, the City Manager of St. Augustine Beach, Max Royle, was asleep at Monday's meeting. He often dozes off.

This is symbolic of St. Augustine Beach's management often being "asleep at the switch" too often -- gulled, cullied and diddled ty St. Johns County, by developers, and by any schlemiel or schemer who comes along, it seems at times,

We can do better, we must do better and we will do better.

St. Augustine City Commissioners Wise to Reject Bad Advice from Flagler Hospital President JOSEPH GORDY re: Sunshine Law Compliance on Our Nation's Oldest City's "Visioning" Process

St. Augustine City Commissioners held a construtive workshop Monday, November 4 concerning the "visioning" process for the future of St. Augustine. Former Mayor Greg Baker led off by describing the trip to Charleston, S.C. and the process followed in 1995. Mayor Baker and Flagler College President William Abare offered their wisdom about planning and the fture of our City. Four local residents spoke (including me, invoking the wisdom of former Mayor Walter Fraser, two U.S. Senators and our then-Congressman, who introduced legislation for a St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore in 1939 -- legislation supported by Mrs. Maurine Boles, our Mayor's mother, which Sheriff David Shoar in 2011 rightly called a "no-brainer.") See www.staugustgreen.com

The only discordant note was from FLAGLER HOSPITAL CEO & President JOSEPH GORDY, who called Sunshine law compliance "stultifying," and advised against it, while saying that in 1995 St. Johns County Chamber of Commerce trained "facilitators" were trained to "shut down" people who spoke at visioning meetings. How gauche. What errant nonsense.

"We the People" -- and our Commmissioners, City Manager and City staff -- all reject JOSEPH GORDY's unwise advice. Our Mayor, Commissioners and City Attorney all agree: this process will comply with Article I, Section 24 of our Florida Constitution, adopted by 83% of Florida voters in November 1992 (3.8 million voted in favor). There are no votes at the table in 2013 for GORDY's backward views, which are antithetical to democracy.

Mossback JOSEPH GORDY's views are a throwback to the "bad 'ole days." Dr. King called St. Augustine the "most lawless" city in America in 1964. In the words of President Lyndon Johnson to a Joint Session of Congress after Selma, "We SHALL overcome!"

JOSEPH GORDY's smarmy, snobby, snooty elitism -- preferring a Chamber of Commerce driven process -- reminds me of Florida Governor RICHARD SCOTT or President RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON.

In the words of Colorado U.S. Senator Gary Warren Hart's 1974 campaign ad, "They've had their turn -- now it's our turn."

64-32 GLBT Rights Wins in United States Senate

An historic day for America. Three cheers for the 64 Senators who voted for equality. God forgive Mario Rubio and the 31 other Senators who voted for bigotry (Rubio is set to speak to an anti-Gay group in Orlando later this month).

Thanks to all 54 Democrats and to 10 Republicans in the Senate, GBLT rights in employment could soon be the law of the land. Let's hope that Speaker of the House John Boehner does not keep it from coming to a vote, as he has threatened.

Enactment of ENDA would mean that 29 states (including Florida) that now allow employment discrimnation would see it ended (at least for employers of 15 or more employees).

I am proud that the City of St. Augustine Beach, Anastasia Mosquito Control Commission of St. Johns County and Sheriff David Shoar all ban sexual orientation discrimination in employment.

I am proud that both the City of St. Augustine and St. Augustine Beach ban anti-Gay discrimination in housing (which City Manager John Regan says helped persuade Grammy-winning Mumford & Sons to play here, showing the way to a new day of diversity). Since John Regan became City Manzger, St. Augustine is no longer what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called it -- the "most lawless" city in America -- and we thank him.

But St. Johns County, outside the Sheriff's office, has no GLBT anti-discrimination policies yet.

In 2008, then-Chairman THOMAS G. MANUEL and the County Commission unamimously voted (twice) to recommend voters approve a Charter, with an anti-discrimnation provision (10.06) that intentionally left out sexual orientation discrimination. Before they voted, I presented them with five pages of strengthening amendments, including adding "sexual orientation" into the non-discrimination policy. There was not even a mention, let alone a motion, from these five pachyderms to protect GLBT rights in their starter Charter. How insulting.

Thus, we defeated that Charter twice, once on the primary ballot and once on the general election ballot.
The lack of GLBT protections was one of the reasons I spoke out against the Charter, which was not a Charter for limited government, and thus not in the spirit of James Madison and our American founders.

Last year, the City of Jacksonville City Council infamously voted in favor of anti-Gay discrimination, with Mayor Alvin Brown (a putative Democrat and an African-American) refusing to lift a finger, make a telephone call or lobby his City Council to support GLBT rights, indulging KKK prejudices with his inculpatory silence. (You have the right to remain silent, Mayor Brown, but we wish you wouldn't: what deals did you make to sell out "our Gay brothers and sisters," as President Obama referred to us in his Second Inaugural Address?)

Yesterday, ENDA passed the Senate, overcoming a filibuster, with cloture invoked and final passage voted by 64-32. We remember the words of President George Herbert Walker Bush in signing the ADA: "Let the shameful walls of discrimination come down." (Even Bush matured: he once voted against the Fair Housing Act as a member of the House of Representatives).

Today, we pray for St. Johns County leaders: despite seven unnanimous 5-0 votes by eleven (11) City Commissioners in both the City of St. Augustine and the City of St. Augustine Beach, St. Johns County has not yet legislated against anti-Gay discrimination.

Worse, the St. Johns County Tourist Development Council (and the Visitor and Convention Bureau and its contractors) have for years now shown hostility toward GLBT people, including:
(a) telling a friend in Texas that he should "go elsewhere" on vacation; and
(b) still refusing to compile or distribute a list of Gay-friendly lodgings, even though there is a growing number of them here in St. Augusine and St. Johns County.

The message of yesterday's United States Senate vote - strongly supported by Fortune 500 companies -- is that bigotry is bad for business. But as JFK said during the Cuban Missile Crisis, "There's always some poor SOB who doesn't get the word."

ENDA was first proposed in 1984 by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, my first boss (1974-76) when I was a Georgetown undergraduate. Before he died, EMK passed the torch to Senator Jeff Merkley, who worked to bring about yesterday's U.S. Senate victory.

Thanks to everyone involved for making this possible.

Progress: S. 815, Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2013

The United States Senate Democratc Cloakroom floor information recording reports that S. 815, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2013, is likely to be voted upon tomorrow in an historic Senate roll call vote at 1:45 PM.

ENDA would forbid discrimination against GLBT people in employment, but not housing, public accomodations or education. That's progress, but not enough. Not nearly enough.

Yet blinkered Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives John Boehner (R-Ohio) has already announced he won't allow a vote. That's crass, crude and undemocratic, running the People's House like a dictatorship.

Meanwhile, closer to home, our City of St. Augustine and St. Augustine Beach both easily banned housing discrimination, both unanimously, during the past eleven months. Yet ENDA does not even cover housing, public accomodations or education, only employment. And why not?

The problem lies with our timid, timorous, tendentious Democratic friends in Congress: they too often "make their deals on the front end," instead of proposing synoptic legislation -- settling in advance for "half a loaf," or less, instead of the whole "enchilada." They need spinal and testicular implants. They need more adviserswho are seasoned legal scholars and litigators, instead of dull apparatchik arachnids fresh out of law schools, corporate law firms (or turkey farms), lugubrious goobers who don't know peaturkey about a durn thing.

When GLBT people buy or rent real estate, stay at a motel, dine in a restaurant or apply to a graduate program, should it be legal under federal law to discrimination against us? Nope.

But, for federal purposes, the Civil Rights housing and public accommodations victories of 1968 and 1964, respectivey, are somehow deemed "a bridge too far."

Some day we'll elect more courageous leaders, but for now, tomorrow's victory will be sweet enough for now. Meanwhile, we await St. Johns County's Tourist Development Council answering our request to provide lists of GLBT-friendly accomodations for our visitors, and stop violating our Fair Housing ordinances in the cities of S. Augustine and St. Augustine Beach. What do y'all reckon? (This reckon's for you).

Progress 101 (Preserving and Protecting St. Augustine, Florida)

I fell in love with St. Augustine, Florida in August 1992, visiting here on the way to and from South Florida after the trial of Varnadore v. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, discussed in an eloquent New York Times obituary back in August.

We moved here on November 5, 1999 -- fourteen (14) years ago yesterday.

During that time (25% of my life), there has been a great deal of progress here in St. Augustine, our Nation's Oldest City -- progress on Environmental Justice, Civil Rights, Civil Liberties, Economic Development and Diversity -- progress documented on this blog since 2006. As I told our City Commissioners at Monday's visioning workshop, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said this was the "most lawless" city in America -- that reality has changed before our eyes, particularly since 2010, when John Patrick Regan, P.E. became our City Manager.

We love this town, and are proud to be a part of preserving and protecting it.

To paraphrase the words of United States Senator Daniel Webster before the U.S. Supreme Court in the Dartmouth College Case, "It's a small [town], but there are those who love it." We commemorate our 450th annversary in 2015, and the 50th anniversary of our 1964 Civil Rights Act next year.

We look forward to Congress and the President adopting a St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore, to preserve and protect what we love, forever. www.staugustgreen.com

From the Mayor's mother (Mrs. Maurine Boles) to Ambassador Andrew Young to St. Johns County Sheriff David Shoar (who called it a "no brainer" back in 2011), virtually everyone who appreciates our nature and beauty wants to make it happen. The idea was first proposed by Mayor Walter Fraser in 1939, supported by both of Florida's U.S. Senators and our then-Congressman -- nearly 75 years ago.

Yes we can!

Progress 102 (Preserving and Protecting Parental Rights to Opt-Out of Military Recruiter Contact With St. Johns County Secondary School Students)

I had a very constructive discussion earlier today with St. Johns County School Board attorney Frank Upchurch, et al. today concerning pending document records requests and my request to send to parents military recruiting opt-out forms, as contemplated in 2005 discussions with Grandmothers for Peace.
As a result, I shall wait for a few days before sending a formal, signed complaint to the Department of Education.

U.S. Department of Education Will Investigate St. Johns County Schools

I spoke with the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, D.C. today, which will be investigating St. Johns County Schools and whether it has failed to give adequate notice students personal information is being shared with military recruiters. SJC School Board has apparently been breaching the promise that Superintendnet Dr. JOSEPH JOYNER made to the late Peg McIntire, the late Robin Nadeau, and Grandmothers for Peace, and which he affirmed to me by telephone at the time. See below.

Interestingly, yesterday's St. Augustine Record carried letter from Eric West, St. Johns County Republican Assembly Chair and Tea Party faction leader, opposing Common Core Standards (supported by our School Board, Superintendent and former Governors). Eric West's letter states in pertinent part, inter alia, "we oppose the collection of student data and the sharing of specific student data without parental consent or knowledge."

In fact, it strongly appears that "sharing of specific student data without parental consent or knowledge" is exactly what St. Johns County School Board has done, sharing students' personal information with military recruiters while hiding the opt-out form on page 59 of the Student Conduct Handbook -- never sending forms home (as was done when President Obama spoke to school children).

Thus, we look forward to Eric West, the St. Johns County Republican Assembly and the Tea Party supporting the request for investigation of St. Johns County Schools.

U.S. Department of Education investigators will communicate with Joyner. They need to take sworn depositions under oath. Our U.S. Department of Education will see that no further promiscuous privacy violations occur by the St. Johns County School Board. All St. Johns County School parents must be advised annually, in a separate mailing, that they have the right to "opt-out" of their childrens' personal information being handed over to the Defense Department (formerly the War Department), pursuant to a 2002 law.

What do you reckon?

CHARACTER COUNTS: St. Johns County School Superintendent Dr. JOSEPH JOYNER, Ed.D. Has Some Explaining to Do About his Breach of Promise to Grandmothers for Peace on Military Recruiting Opt-Out Forms

"Character counts!" is the motto of the St. Johns County School Board.

Buried at the back ot the St. Johns County Student Conduct Handbook, at page 59, is a vague notice -- either insufficent as a matter of law or the minimum legally possible -- that parents may "opt out" of giving children's personal information to the military (and military recruiters contacting their children). Journalists have documented military recruiters under heavy-handed pressure from the Defense Department, targetting at-risk students, promising them anything to give a life, an arm or a legal for foreign wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Parents have a legal right to spare their children's personal information being shared with the Defense Department (formerly known as the "War Department").

Thus, in 2005, St. Johns County School Superintendent Dr. JOSPEH JOYNER, Ed.D., promised Grandmothers for Penace some seven years ago to send home opt out forms each year, which is his legal duty. Dr. JOSEPH JOYNER has hidden them well -- Page 59, at the back of the book!

"Character Counts!"

When Peg McIntire, Laura Braly, and Anne Galloway from People for Peace and Justice and Grandmothers for Peace brought this issue to the attention of our School Board in 2005, School Board member Tommy Allen did not want to comply, treating the Grandmothers for Peace ladies disdainfully and disrespectfully. The St. Augustine Record quoted Allen stating, "Without a strong standing mlitary, our nation cannot survive.... We need a strong force to recruit the military. I can't bite my tongue always."

"Character Counts!"

Consistent with Allen's views, our St. Johns County School Board is hiding the military recruiting "opt out" form on page 59 of the Student Handbook and does not explain it articulately, as it does every other policy. That's apparently why recent graduates and parents have told me they have NEVER seen the form and did not know of their rights.

"Character Counts!"

The same St. Johns County School Board that buried the military recruiting "opt out" form in 2005 then ordered 30,000 copies of a biogted "opt out" form in 2009 (six boxes of copy paper and lots of toner) to be sent home to parents.

It's our money.

It happened in America, back in September 2009 when President Barack Obama was scheduled to speak to elementary and secondary school students about staying in school. The School Board also fomented junk robotic phone calls lobbying parents (and anyone with a land line telephone) for "opt out" signatures, misstating facts with flyspecking nitpicking, criticizing the lack of advance materials, doing so in the voice of St. Johns County School principals, one of whom said that the Secretary of Education's name was "Anne Duncan." (It's Arne, and he is the former Chicago School Superindent).

"Character Counts!"

This bigots' "opt-out" scheme was not to protect students' personal information, but to allow bigots -- in what former County Commission Chairman Ben Eich called "one of the last bastions of the Ku Klux Klan" --- to preven their children from hearing our first African-American President speak about the need to study and stay in school. (President George W. Bush gave such a speech without such partisan attacks).

Why did St. Johns County's Republican-dominated School Board commit this hate crime, with 30,000 pages of "opt-out" forms sent home? THey are other-directed rightist knee-jerks. Then-Republican Party of Florida Chair JAMES GREER denounced President Barack Obama's stay-in-school speech before it was delivered, saying it was to "indoctrinate socialism." Again, President Bush spoke to students without trouble. But St. Johns County's robotic School Board dutifully sent out not only "opt out" forms but robotic phone calls!

"Character Counts!"

By the way, the man who was responsible for the "opt out" forms, then-Republican Party of Florida (RPOF) Chair JAMES GREER was sentenced to prison in March 2013 to eighteen (18) months in a Florida prison and one year of probation for stealing some $125,000 from the Republican Party of Florida -- four counts of theft and one of money laundering involving VICTORY STRATEGIES LLC, the shell company GREER established to steal from RPOF. GREER was a former Tallahassee lobbyists for bars and restaurants, who advised businesses on regulatory compliance. In sentencing JAMES GREER to prison, Orlando Circuit Judge Marc Lubet ruled that GREER "egregiously violated a position of trust." http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2013-03-27/news/os-jim-greer-sentence-20130327_1_victory-strategies-llc-defense-attorney-damon-chase-jim-greer

JAMES GREER,whose family lives in his Oveido mansion while he serves his prison term, was part of the inner circle of former Republican Governor CHARLES CRIST, now running for Governor as a Democrat. CRIST was scheduled to be a witness at trial. At the time of sentencing on September 27, 2012, GREER's lawyer bragged he would be "out by next summer," refusing to disclose to reporters who paid GREER's fine and who was employing GREER's previously stay-at-home wife while he serves his prison sentence for theft and money-laundering. Sounds like "hush money."

"Character Counts!"

So make no mistake -- St. Johns County Schools:
(a) followed the advice of a now-convicted thief -- corrupt Republican Party of Florida Chair JAMES GREER -- in requiring "opt out" forms for President Obama's September 2009 speech; BUT
(b) won't provide documents on the etiology of its burying the military recruiting "opt out" form on page 59 of its Student Conduct Handbook.

"Character Counts!"

Again, "Character Counts" is the motto of St. Johns County Schools. School Superintendent JOSEPH JOYNER, Ph.D. made a solemn personal promise to Grandmothers for Peace and my late friends and mentors Peg McIntire and Robin Nadeau. JOYNER promised to send home military recruiting "opt out" forms.

St. Johns County School Superintendent JOSEPH JOYNER must keep his promise to Grandmothers for Peace, Peg McIntire and Robin Nadeau -- which is NOT kept by his burying a vaguely worded form on page 59 of the Student Conduct Handbook.

I wrote Dr. JOSEPH JOYNER, Ed.D., some 29 days ago about his promise. He passed it off to another Ph.D., Assistant School Superintendent PAUL ABBATINOZZI, who wrote me a snooty E-mail about page 59. Assistant School Superintendent ABBATINOZZI evidently doesn't know enough manners to thank Open Records requesters and respond to their requests, or to use a proper salutation (no "Dear" here).

I also spoke with a School Board member, who promised to look into the matter, but has not yet called back. He is out of the office today.

To be continued.....