You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Screaming at sheriff; “Who Are You?” through a pane of bullet proof glass.
It’s a Friday afternoon. I’m at a remote county sheriff’s office. I’ve not been here before and it feels isolated, small town, in an Andy Griffith kind of way.
I am in the lobby of the small sheriff’s office comprised of painted cinder blocks and fluorescent lights. Somewhere in these Cicada stained hills, banjos are playing.
There are posters on the wall warning me about the dangers of meth and exchanging my old prescription medicines in a timely manner.
The waiting room is composed of a few plastic chairs and a large glass reception window made of thick bullet proof glass.
I stare into the office, through the inch thick glass. I see 2 women at desks. They are unconcerned with my presence. There is also a thin man with an aqua blue golf shirt. He has gray hair and a sinister looking mustache on his bony face.
I step to the glass. There is no buzzer or bell. I simply have to wait till I am noticed.
I look for a picture of the sheriff, something that tells me who I am here to see. I don’t know the sheriff in this county off the grid. I have never come to this county to interview this sheriff for anything that I can remember in my 20 years.
I’m here because the sheriff is under investigation by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. I am here because multiple sources, trusted sources, close to the epicenter of this seismic quake, have informed me that the sheriff acted inappropriately.
According to my sources, this sheriff, no stranger to grand jury presentments, let a DUI suspect off the hook.
It is a classic case of the good ole boy system alive and well in the 21st century.
According to my sources, one of the sheriff’s deputies is behind a car weaving all over the road on a Saturday night. According to my source, before the deputy can light up the DUI offender, the car clips another motorist. It is a minor fender bender and thankfully nobody is hurt. I’m told the deputy witnesses the collision, and pulls the DUI suspect over.
The deputy performs a series of field sobriety tests and arrests the driver. Sad but simple, right?
A deputy just making ends meet, putting his life on the line in a back assward county is out late at night doing his job.
Wanting to be kind, the deputy allows the driver to call a friend to pick up the car so it would not have to be towed causing another expense to the now arrested driver.
According to my sources, the driver did call a friend, one who wears a badge. According to my source, the driver hands the deputy the phone and the tainted sheriff of this backward county proceeds to tell his deputy to tear up the ticket and make sure the driver gets home safely.
The deputy walks over to the city officers who have responded as back up and says; “sheriff said to let the driver go.”
The city officers who witness the stop are appalled.
The city officers, both armed with body cam, know this reeks of injustice.
A week later the word is out. The city police are pissed. They just watched a DUI suspect arrested, then a phone call is made and then, like it never happened, POOF, the deputy becomes a cabbie and is driving the alleged offender home.
WTF?
Who gets pulled over for a DUI and calls the sheriff? What sheriff in his right mind, not on the scene of the alleged crime, blankly orders his deputy to become a gun wearing Uber Driver and take the offender home?
So I’m in the lobby, looking for the sheriff, a man I have never met. The man in the blue golf shirt approaches the window. He is thin and wiry. He looks like an office worker, a morgue tech, a guy who runs the shell game on the sidewalk at Venice Beach.
“Can I help you?” he says. He seems angry, put off that I might be at his window.
Not a very polite disposition for an office worker I think to myself.
“I’d like to talk to the sheriff. Is he here?” I’m not rude, but I’m not soft and dainty. I’m not here to sell pansies to the poor. I sense this guy is an undercurrent of trouble and I’m already digging my feet into the sand to resist the pull of his demeanor.
The man is agitated. I can tell the question irks him. I look behind the man in the blue shirt to the secretaries in the rear. They are staring at me like I am Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.
“What do you want?” The man in the blue shirt snaps. His tone is arrogant, curt, angry.
I stare at his face. It is hard and bony like a skeleton with a bad attitude. His face is tanned, too tanned for an office worker, I think.
Still, I am polite and answer his query. “I want to talk to him about the TBI investigation.”
The question is tracer fire across the bow of his existence. If he could come through the bullet proof glass dividing us, slap me in my stupid journalistic head, I think he would.
“It’s an investigation, can’t comment on an open investigation.”
That’s a weird response for an office manager, I think in that split second. I can see many responses more suitable. “The sheriff’s out or I’ll get the sheriff for you.”
But “Can’t comment on an open investigation?”
I begin to think that this man is higher up the food chain of control than I have been lead to believe. I quickly surmise that I don’t know who this golf shirt wearing snot bag is. He has not identified himself, he has not said hello or told me where the sheriff is. Who is this guy? Who is this golf shirt wearing man who is all aggressive and puffing out his scrawny, bony chest?
I feel a little twinge in the back of my spine. It is a neuron pulse, like a bullet train of reaction. It’s not anger, it’s not fear, it’s just a pulse warning me that something is about to happen.
“Who are you?” he angrily snaps, his hot stink breath fogging the glass.
“Cordan,” I say.
Inside my head, I laugh. I don’t even use my 1st name. This angry skeleton before me doesn’t even deserve the second syllable.
“Where’s the sheriff?,” I ask again, leaning in closer to the glass partition.
“Can’t comment on an open investigation,” he says again as if that is the magic elixir to this ailment.
With that he turns and puts up his hand as if to dismiss me and my annoying questions.
“Who are you?,” I shout, my own voice slapping the glass rebounding into my face.
I watch the rude skeleton with the blue golf shirt storm into an office behind the secretaries. My eyes are not good, but I can plainly see a sign over the door of the office that reads: SHERIFF.
“Is that the sheriff?,” I shout to the secretaries. They refuse to answer or even look at me. I can see fear in their faces.
“I told you who I was. WHO ARE YOU?”
I pause for a moment and then I laugh.
Really? The blue shirt man is the sheriff? He stood here, eye to eye, and didn’t identify himself to me, even after I said I wanted to talk to the sheriff.
Seems to me that would have been a perfect time to say “I’m the damn sheriff, boy. What’s your problem.”
But this skeleton of duplicitous means played me like a river boat gambler with aces up his sleeve.
I turn away from the glass partition and face my camera man.
“That was the sheriff,” I say. “He wouldn’t tell us who he was, or acknowledge our request.”
We walk out of the office and stand in the shade by the sign on the front lawn. I do stand ups that will raise serious questions about the sheriff, his motives and the formal investigation now underway.
“He made himself look bad,” a source will say after watching the unusual, and unnecessary confrontation.
His lieutenant will call the newsroom later to qualify the report that I still have not read, and has yet to be sent. I question if there is a report. I question how a man not on the scene can write a report days after the alleged incident happened. Again, another topic for TBI investigators to look into. But the Lieutenant tells the assignment editor that the reporter who confronted the sheriff was rude.
I chuckle when I hear that one. Rude? yeah maybe it seemed that way through a 2″ pain of glass.
Apparently a lot can be misconstrued when talking through a clear barrier of justice, including the truth.
Life’s Crazy™