I’ve posted some new pix of my room makeover progress over at Babble Voices tonight.

What do you think?

G made a bold, last- minute decision to channel Ozzy for Halloween 2011.

As I mention every year around this time, I kind of detest Halloween. It’s my least favorite holiday. But I am always impressed with how my sister Betsy does it up right.

Here’s my very, very tall niece E (Betsy’s oldest) who turns 13 this week (!!!) at school this morning, rockin’ the very, very tall gnome hat that Betsy made her as part of her gnome Halloween costume.

She is so cute in this costume I can barely stand it

A very tall (and very cute) Halloween gnome.

What are your kids (or you) going to be for Halloween this year? Are you good at making costumes from scratch, like Betsy is?  ( and I am not) Are you a Halloween hater like me or do you love it?

In Tennessee, it has long been well-accepted practice for family court judges to issue a blanket (ha! I made a pun!) prohibition in their custody agreements barring divorced parents from having romantic partners spend the night in their homes when the kids are there.  But now,  “A recent series of Tennessee Court of Appeals decisions makes it clear that judges can no longer automatically forbid parents from having their romantic partners spend the night, lawyers say. Instead, they say, there has to be proof that the overnight stays harm a child.”

This is clearly a hot topic, and I have my own opinions on the matter, and I bet that many of you do as well. Head on over to my latest post at my Home/Work blog at Babble Voices to read my personal take on this new direction in our family courts, and to share your own opinions on/experiences with post-divorce paramour jammie time in homes with children.

When I have time (I am really behind at work and with freelance assignments due to dealing with a sick baby the last week or two), I will chime in here with my specific observations on today’s Knoxville News Sentinel story about Amber Blizard’s case, about Henry, and about prosecuting dealers in overdose deaths, but first, I’d like to hear YOUR specific thoughts and insights and observations after reading this new story.

•  Here’s today’s  News Sentinel story, titled, “Prosecuting overdoses case requires cultural change.” The subtitle  to the piece sets up the conclusion readers are led to come to in the piece, and clarifies the position of the reporter/newspaper regarding this issue – basically the position they’ve taken in every story they’ve ever written on my son Henry’s case. It reads, “Drug-dealing arrests often hopeless undertaking.”

After you’ve carefully read today’s News Sentinel story for yourself, please comment below with your takeaways from it.  I look forward to hearing others’ points of view on the piece, and how it’s written, sourced, etc.

+++++

Also, until I have time to write up my own opinion of the story, including my observations on its completeness, its tone, factual accuracy, and conclusions, I will let this Dixie Chicks song and video speak for me. The song represents quite clearly how I am feeling after first read of the new story early this morning, and how I feel about the News Sentinel’s coverage of my son’s case generally.

+++++

PLEASE BECOME A FRIEND OF HENRY’S FUND ON FACEBOOK

+++++

Please join the conversation in the comments below.

I think (pray) that G has finally turned the corner tonight after 72 hours on antibiotics and 14 days of being the sickest she’s been in her whole life.

I say this because she hasn’t whined or cried in the last 90 minutes, and she actually allowed me to move about a room freely without her clinging to me pitifully and screaming.

This has been one exhausting two weeks for sure. I even had to take a full sick day from work on Friday, and the whole weekend has been totally a blur of sick, cranky one year old.

So if I owe you an unreturned email, phone call or work product of some type, thanks for your patience and understanding. I’ll kick out the jams and get caught up starting 1st thing in the AM.

Please cross your fingers along with me that we have crossed the sick baby Rubicon tonight…

Leo says, “Sure, they hung a giant metal monkey they swiped out of Henry’s Garden on my neck and made me wear it around until an adult noticed and put it back where it belongs, but as long as they hug on me like this, it’s all good.”

In the last 24 hours, local Knoxville media has been reporting a developing story so disturbing that it will make your blood run cold. What’s coming to light this weekend is straight up terrifying.

This story apparently “broke” when Knox County Sheriff Jimmy “JJ” Jones’ Public Information Officer Martha Dooley (y’all remember Ms. Dooley,right?) or maybe her assistant distributed a press release late Friday afternoon indicating that five specific Knox County Sheriff’s Deputies have been “demoted” to corrections officers (meaning they still have jobs with KCSO and will now work in the county jail) as the result of some kind of unspecified misconduct during a late night traffic stop on October 16.

Along with the press release which gave no clear information regarding what these men did to merit simultaneous demotions, or how the internal disciplinary process was undertaken to come to the demotion decision, was a statement from Sheriff Jones himself that on first glance, might appear quite stern and forthright. It reads:

“This is an embarrassing incident to the Sheriff’s Office and certainly is not indicative of the men and women who work hard and are very professional,” the sheriff said in a statement. “I am releasing this information before any media inquiries because I think it’s important for us to be open and honest.”

Okaaaaay…

So what is this “embarrassing incident” to which the Sheriff refers, yet then adroitly sidesteps actually describing?

What the heck happened?

+++++

The local newspaper had only the Sheriff’s release when they first ran the story late yesterday afternoon, with the info coming from KCSO at a time of day at the end of the week obviously designed to make it more difficult for reporters to get answers to the questions I guess the Sheriff hoped his stern sounding statement of totally vague rebuke would prevent being asked.

However, to their credit, Knoxville News Sentinel and WBIR reporters did NOT drink the Sheriff’s clumsily offered, late-day Friday Kool-Aid, and they dug in last night and this morning, getting hold of more info, including the partial dashcam video of what the Sheriff mildly characterizes as an “embarrassing incident,” but which now appears to be something far more troubling – something more along the lines of illegal harassment and bullying of a group of unarmed teenagers – and one 19 year old boy in particular – who had the bad luck to run into a pack of armed wolves in KCSO uniforms on a dark road, late on a Saturday night in Knox County, TN.

Kudos to KNS reporter Matt Lakin and his newsroom colleagues for the work he’s done already on a story where no one in KCSO will tell him anything and plus, it’s the weekend, which makes it harder to report anything.

From Matt Lakin’s story today (which includes a video of the dashcam tape before it was disabled):

Whatever the driver did to avoid a traffic ticket, the cameras didn’t capture it. Knox County Sheriff Jimmy “J.J.” Jones says it was enough to cost five deputies their badges, guns, cruisers and police powers. The sheriff said he demoted the officers from patrol to corrections after they admitted to “improvising” a creative punishment for a 19-year-old driver stopped on suspicion of speeding Oct. 16…. The sheriff wouldn’t describe what the deputies did. Knox County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Martha Dooley said video from their in-car cameras spoke for itself….But the videos don’t show the punishment officers devised, and the sound cuts out just as the punishment starts. The sheriff didn’t say whether the deputies turned off their microphones — a violation of KCSO policy — although records show at least one of the deputies, Cox, has been reprimanded for that before….The videos show Rehg pulling over a car filled with people on Emory Road just before 1 a.m. The driver identifies himself as {NAME REDACTED BY KATIE} and admits to speeding through a red light. Rehg accuses him of drag racing….The officers curse throughout the traffic stop and finally ask {NAME REDACTED} who’s off-camera, whether he’s embarrassed. One deputy holds a baseball bat….”Yes, sir, very embarrassed,” (the teenager) said.”Well, let me ask you a question,” one of the officers said. “Do you want to be a little more embarrassed and get away with one speeding ticket, a couple miles over (the limit), or do you want to get three tickets. … This officer’s got a proposition for you. If you do it, and you do it good, this officer’s only gonna give you one ticket for speeding.” The sound cuts out at that point and never resumes. The video shows the deputies gathered around laughing, one wiping his eyes, and the carload of teenagers driving away. (The 19 year old driver) couldn’t be reached for comment Friday. It’s not clear yet whether (the driver) was ticketed and, if so, for what alleged offense.

This is a still photo from the dashcam video before it goes black. It depicts one of the KCSO Deputies leeringly offering a “proposition” – apparently involving a baseball bat the officers just happened to have with them – to an unarmed teenage boy.

WBIR’s online story today (no reporter byline for me to credit) offers even more chilling details from the video, including the officers use of disrespectful language, their laughter, and the fact that one deputy is seen removing the baseball bat from his trunk and then handing it off to one of the other KCSO thugs. The passengers in the car – including two girls – are forced to sit on the side of the road and observe whatever abuse or humiliation their friend the driver endured.

WBIR also notes that timestamps on the video indicate that these kids may have been harassed by 5 leering men with guns and a baseball bat for as long as 30 minutes that night – during which the video was disabled as the teenage boy in that photo above was forced to “do good” at whatever “proposition” he’d had “offered” to him as an alternative to what the officers strongly suggested would be multiple trumped up criminal charges.
+++++

As a mother, I cried – literally – when I watched the video and listened to those officers laughingly terrorize those kids on that dark road. And I shudder to imagine what took place when the video went dark, almost certainly because one of the officers purposely switched it off, which should be an offense worthy if termination itself.

Depending on how awful it was, that young man may be too mortified to ever speak publicly or endure the painful challenges that trying to bring an actual lawsuit against KCSO would bring. Someone did file a “complaint” about the stop with KCSO itself – perhaps assuming that an internal affairs probe would not expose what happened to the media as an external lawsuit would – and apparently the person who filed the complaint with KCSO asked that the young man’s name not be made public.

And I suspect that this may be what KCSO leadership is counting on – that a traumatized teenage boy and his family will not want to put him through any more hell than he’s already been through, meaning that KCSO leadership will never truly be held accountable for the culture they have encouraged inside that agency where something like this could take place – a citizen terrorized for sick personal amusement by FIVE OFFICERS. I mean, any agency can have one rogue bad officer out there on patrol, no matter how ethical and professional that agency’s leadership is. But FIVE OFFICERS willing to do this in a pack, seemingly happy and unsurprised that one of them had his baseball bat handy?

Terrifying.

Even if whatever the “proposition” that was ultimately forced on this young man was was not explicitly sexual or overtly physically assaultive, but was instead just more garden-variety police-gang abuse and harassment with a very obvious implied threat of violence, this incident is far more than “embarrassing” for KCSO. It’s chillingly serious, and speaks to something very seriously wrong inside that law enforcement agency.
+++++

Sadly, I can speak firsthand of the way KCSO’s leadership places political power and personal egos above public safety. KCSO’s top leadership circle is an arrogant, self-serving political machine more concerned with how things look than how things really are, and totally lacking in fundamental respect for the rights or needs of the average Knox County citizens they are supposed to serve.

KCSO’s leadership demonstrates by their own behavior that they believe “might makes right,” and these people are so full of themselves (because they’ve gotten away with behaving this way for so long) that they truly don’t believe they owe anyone a damn thing, even if the law or ethics or protocol or common decency says that they do.

Here’s just one example of the unfettered arrogance of KCSO toward local taxpayers. Even after my blogging about my son’s case and the local media coverage, I’m still not sure local citizens understand clearly that what I am about to describe actually happened because it’s so outrageous that it doesn’t seem possible that it could be true…but it is.

KCSO officially opened a criminal investigation in my son Henry’s case on April 27, 2010. They officially closed it July 16, 2011. During that entire 15 month period, I NEVER ONCE laid eyes on a KCSO employee of any type, despite my frequent pleas for a meeting, pleas made via phone message and emails and finally, certified letter. In fact, the last time Henry’s father or I were ever able to speak by phone to the KCSO officer assigned to our son’s case – or anyone from KCSO for that matter- was June 1, 2010 – the day after Henry died.

After June 1, 2010, and until we received a letter on July 18,2011 informing us that our son’s case was closed by KCSO, the agency’s personnel simply refused to respond to us in any way. They never returned a single phone message. They never responded to the dozens of written pleas I sent to everyone from the Sheriff on down politely begging for some kind of contact with them to discuss Henry’s case.

Nada.

Yes, you are reading this correctly; what I am saying is that starting on June 1, 2010, KCSO simply refused to communicate with us in any way, no matter how we attempted contact. They made no effort to even pretend that they had any intention of returning a phone call or responding to dozens of written requests for information, much less actually meet with our family in person.

Completely denying me any contact with them or access to information was part of KCSO’s larger pattern of retaliatory behavior toward me for exercising my free speech rights early on. And they behave this way because they can; in my own case KCSO has faced absolutely no consequences for this shocking behavior toward a taxpayer and the mother of a victim in one of their own open investigations, and I had no recourse to make them respond to me. A national reporter did attempt 10 months after Henry died to ask the deputy assigned to Henry’s case whether he’d ever met me. But the KCSO deputy simply hung up on her instead of answering.

+++++

The complete and utter willful refusal to respond to me in any way was KCSO’s way of punishing me. They punished me because they are so ego-driven and political that they become personally infuriated if anyone dares to ask them any hard questions, especially publicly. This is the way KCSO operates from the top down.

So although no one from KCSO has ever physically threatened or assaulted me with a baseball bat, there is no way to adequately convey the hell that Sheriff Jones and his employees put me through over the last year.

Once I dared to publicly question the adequacy of their investigation into the circumstances of my son’s physical and overdose-related injuries (a reasonable thing to question at that point given what was happening), their behavior morphed from what had seemed like mere indifferent incompetence with regard to figuring out who killed my son and whether they continued to pose a risk to others, into retaliatory CYA malfeasance, often directed at me.

(And of course we’ve only very recently learned that the early indifference KCSO showed before Henry died might have been a more deliberate non-activity in the case, influenced by a well-connected local individual’s documented lunchtime conversation with Sheriff Jones within the first 72 hours after Henry entered the hospital.)

In any event, however, once I politely but yes, publicly raised my legitimate concerns about how my son’s case was being handled, KCSO leadership began a pattern of retaliatory action over the next year, simply because I exercised my free speech rights.

They kicked it off in fine form with the release of my son’s unabridged, complete preliminary autopsy report directly to the media only 4 days after he died, on the day of his funeral, with absolutely NO notice to me or Henry’s father that this was going to happen or that it even existed. We had no idea that there would be a preliminary autopsy report, and we certainly had no expectation that we would read it online for the first time, in it’s graphic entirety, complete with snarky commentary by Sheriff Jones.

Usually, the media has to beg for a preliminary autopsy in an open criminal investigation. They have to file open records requests, and then KCSO or the Medical Examiner have five days before they even have to respond to that request.

My son hadn’t even been DEAD 5 days when thanks to KCSO leadership, the full details of his preliminary autopsy were distributed to themedia, along with unprecedented public statements by the Sheriff in a criminal investigation where the victim had only died a few days earlier.

And some of the comments he made in the media on the day of my child’s funeral were even pointedly directed at me, specifically referencing the fact that I had written a post on my mommyblog the week before questioning the fact hat Henry died after 38 days of hospitalization without anyone from the law enforcement agency assigned to the case ever laying eyes on him or our family. This apparently rankled Sheriff Jones a fair bit.

This was all it took for me to become someone whom I am told on very accurate authority (because yes, there are good people inside KCSO who are deeply troubled by the leadership) has been openly referred to by taxpayer-salaried KCSO officials as “that bitch” in meetings that took place in JJ Jones’ taxpayer-provided office over the last year – meetings in which he and his team discussed not how best to arrest the drug dealers who killed my son and were still selling to other local kids, but instead what a giant pain in the ass I was, and how they could make my life more difficult and thwart my quest to see that a real investigation happened.
+++++

So you see, while I’ve never experienced the far more horrible and direct terror of finding myself alone on a dark road with 5 armed KCSO deputies with a baseball bat and a “proposition,” I am intimately acquainted with a leadership style and attitude inside that law enforcement agency that is clearly trickling down the ranks and fostering a culture where something like the Sheriff’s “embarrassing incident” on October 16 could even begin to happen.
+++++

And given how Sheriff Jones has now chosen to handle these deputies’ abusive, terrible, oppressive behavior toward young Knox County citizens, that culture will continue to flourish.

These deputies – several of whom already have a history of documented misconduct – are not being fired. Nope, they get to keep their jobs with KCSO.

Now, those 5 men with uniforms and a baseball bat have been relocated into KCSO’s department of “corrections,” meaning that the people these dangerous new jailers will oversee every day are prisoners in the county detention center – the population of local citizens who are almost certainly THE MOST VULNERABLE to law enforcement abuses.

Why in God’s name would you move five people whom you publicly acknowledge have behaved this way on patrol into jobs where they will have even MORE ACCESS AND OPPORTUNITY to abuse citizens who are now completely and totally at their mercy, and who are already seen as “undesirable” so nobody much cares what some rogue corrections guy does to one of them anyway?
+++++

Since the Knoxville Police Department’s (KPD) amazing and commendable arrests last month of three accused drug dealers with ties to my son’s death, I seriously considered completely ending my previous public calls for citizen and media awareness of the way KCSO is being operated.

In the past year, I’ve come to understand in a way I never really had before that KCSO’s highly political leadership is amazingly powerful and influential within many different private and public institutions and organizations in this community where I live, work and raise my family. Thus, I have been repeatedly encouraged by a variety of folks who work in all kinds of roles in Knox County to stop speaking out on this issue because it can cause problems for good people in this county who must remain in the Sheriff’s good graces if they want to have any hope of being productive in their own work.

I understand that sensitivity, and I considered ending my public dialogue on this topic of major civic importance. I don’t want to ever unnecessarily cause problems for good people who are trying to do good work inside a local political system that’s not something they can wave a wand and change themselves.

And then I watched that partial dashcam video this morning, the one where the five deputies terrorized some other Knox County mother’s teenage son.

And I knew that remaining silent is not an option for me. It just isn’t.

I hope those for whom I hold huge respect and who would probably prefer for me to hush up about this issue will understand and respect why I cannot in good conscience do so. I think they will. Too many people in Knox County are afraid to have this conversation publicly. That has to change. It really does
+++++

To all of you reading this, please don’t think this could never happen to to you, your family member, your teenage driver who happens to run a red light late at night in Knox County, Tennessee. Because it could.

When do we as a community say “enough” here? I pray that it will be this time, that this time, KCSO leadership has gone too far, and local media will actually lay it all bare in the honest, investigative, factual and unbiased way this issue demands.

If Knoxville media takes this newest story and runs with it as they should, perhaps our community will finally shake off the political machine within the Knox County Sheriff’s Office that for too long has behaved in ways that leave all Knox County citizens less safe than we have a right to be.
+++++

The office of Knox County Sheriff is an elected one. It’s time for those of us who want change to begin carefully considering which qualified law enforcement professionals in our community might have what it takes to campaign and win, and to lead KCSO with the integrity that this agency’s employees and our community deserve.

If you care about the future of Knox County as I do, please share this blog post with your friends, neighbors, coworkers and fellow congregants. It’s time that we stand up together for change.

-Katie