Police Botched Investigation

When a journalist breaks his word to a source, he loses all credibility and ceases to be a viable prober for the truth. His career is finished. The damage is no less severe when it’s a police officer who goes back on his word.

For six weeks, a high-ranking Bristol Tennessee police officer violated an agreement with this newspaper. In doing so, he severed a sacred bond that allows reporters and bureaucrats to expose the truth, and in the process eroded those two great disinfectants, sunshine and transparency.

Capt. Charlie Thomas of the BTPD has run point on the homicide investigation involving the March 1 death of beloved local musician Jef Roberts, who was punched outside a downtown restaurant, fell and hit his head on the curb, and died a week later.

Thomas quickly told the Bristol Herald Courier on the record that the preliminary finding was that the puncher – an Army food inspector from Fort Campbell, Ky. – acted in self-defense after Roberts cursed his wife and started to throw his own punch first.

The Bristol police captain is a thoughtful man who often is at the center of some of the most controversial and compelling criminal cases in this area. But he does a lousy job of cooperating with local media and thus, a lousy job at keeping taxpayers informed. Claiming he was once burned by this newspaper in some long-ago unnamed controversy, Thomas since early March would only talk to us off the record about the Roberts case. We made a deal with Thomas – such deals are commonplace in journalism – to not print anything he told us and, in return, Thomas promised to notify the Herald Courier the instant the autopsy report arrived. That autopsy report, he said, would validate the police investigation and put to rest claims by Roberts’ friends of a police cover-up.

Thomas essentially was right about the autopsy. But he lied by keeping it from us. There’s no other way to say it.

The autopsy findings came in May 1. While we did not do a good enough job of hounding Thomas, we fully believed his pledge. It was not until another BHC reporter cornered him in his office Monday that he came clean, admitting in the process that he had violated his end of the agreement. Once an off-the-record agreement is violated, then everything Capt. Thomas told us is fair game. We no longer are bound by our agreement, and in fact, it’s incumbent upon us to expose the source who reneged.

We can’t speak for the Herald Courier of old, but this newspaper in recent years has been more than fair and kind and even magnanimous to Thomas. For example, when Thomas spearheaded the 2007 investigation into kidnap victim Heather Young by her estranged husband, Doug, we documented Thomas’ dogged investigation, which culminated with the woman’s release and husband’s arrest in Georgia. We pictured Thomas on the front page with a relieved tear in his eye.

That Thomas would allow the Jef Roberts case – a powder keg if there ever was one – to continue smoldering without revealing the conclusion of the autopsy that he himself said would validate the investigation speaks to a huge lapse in judgment, not to mention the breaking of one man’s word to another man, reporter Michael L. Owens.

Since Thomas won’t return our calls anymore – he rarely has anyway – let us fill in some of the blanks of this horrible tragedy.

Thomas told us for the initial, March 3 article: “From the witness statements that we got, Mr. Roberts initiated the confrontation, shoved the husband and then drew his fist like he was going to punch him. [Thach] was defending himself.”

During that interview, Thomas stressed that autopsy results were being awaited but made the extraordinary clumsy claim that Roberts, who suffered from leg blood clots and walked with a cane, died of unrelated medical conditions and not from hitting his head on the curb outside the restaurant. Roberts’ friends remain incredulous at the captain’s mention of “some pre-existing medical conditions. ... From what we’ve gathered,” the police captain said in the article, “the injuries that [Roberts] sustained were not life-threatening. This was just an unfortunate series of events.”

Thomas’ nonsensical conclusion has fueled a 3½-month-long controversy in which Roberts’ legion of friends has poked holes in the police investigation and defamed this newspaper for reporting the police conclusions of self-defense.

Even if those conclusions are correct, there can be little doubt that Bristol Tennessee police botched the investigation. For example, Thomas told us on the record that Thach waited 30 seconds after Roberts drew back his fist before he threw his only punch. Thomas, however, has refused to elaborate on that claim or even to reconfirm it.

Roberts’ friends also have seized on the allegation that Thach fled the scene, wasn’t questioned until hours later, never had his blood-alcohol level tested and benefited from a pro-military police department and its hometown newspaper. The last allegation is beyond ludicrous. The first appears false, but the two allegations in the middle indeed are gospel.

Here’s what Thomas told us, off the record, after our initial reports: Thach didn’t flee Machiavelli’s; he was advised by a restaurant owner to leave before Roberts’ friends could tear him to pieces. He calmly walked to his vehicle and returned to the Courtyard by Marriott, seven miles inside the commonwealth of Virginia. He did not flee the scene of a crime, as Roberts’ friends claim.

Why police waited three hours to question him is the police department’s fault, not Thach’s, who Roberts said returned to Machiavelli’s once earlier and called several times just to express concerns over Roberts’ condition. That does not sound like a blood-thirsty killer.

Thach willingly agreed to follow police back into Tennessee to be questioned – albeit three hours later – and had his account supported by several family witnesses and one of Machiavelli’s co-owners, Thomas told us off the record. The co-owner of the business, however, has been telling Roberts’ friends that Thach was the aggressor – an account that Thomas has denied.

Here’s what can’t be disputed and is proven in the autopsy report: Roberts was 3½ times the legal limit for driving under the influence of alcohol (he was not driving) – with a blood-alcohol level of .274. There can be no doubt that Roberts suffered from blood clots in his leg and needed a cane to walk, according to his friends. It’s also obvious that Roberts, at nearly 330 pounds, according to the autopsy, did not fall because of one punch from a man half his size but because of a combination of the punch, his medical condition and his inebriation. There also can be no doubt that Roberts had a huge problem with alcohol – six prior alcohol-related arrests.

The problem with this case is that even if police are correct and Thach is telling the truth, police have aided and abetted conspiracy theories by failing to timely question Thach. The allegation that police waited too long to take Thach’s blood-alcohol level is a red herring, however. Having alcohol in your system is not a crime; driving at the time is. Absent evidence of that, police had no probable cause to even test Thach’s blood-alcohol level.

Further fueling claims of a shoddy police investigation are this fact: Only one person – Police Officer Mike McCoy – testified May 27 before the secret grand jury, according to District Attorney H. Greeley Wells. Why wasn’t Thach called to testify? Essentially, one police officer was called to restate the premature conclusion already arrived at by his investigation four months earlier.

Thomas then poured diesel on this PR fire by practicing medicine without a license and speculating that a head blow to a curb didn’t kill Roberts.

Roberts’ friends, meanwhile, have martyred a man who by many accounts was inspirational and sweet as long as he stayed sober. But any objective source familiar with the downtown party scene will tell you that once fueled by alcohol, Roberts became belligerent. The police allegation that Roberts cursed Thach’s wife is certainly believable given Roberts’ level of intoxication.

No one wins with this case. Roberts is dead and his mother is left forever grief-stricken. Roberts’ hundreds, maybe thousands, of friends are angry and lashing out at whatever target wanders by – be it police, this newspaper, Thach, his family and anonymous strangers who disagree with them in response to articles posted on our Web site, TriCities.com. Some of Roberts’ friends have even reduced themselves to criticizing the physical appearance of our reporters, whose photos accompany online articles.

We understand the pain they are enduring. And we sincerely wish that the first article on this tragedy had been published right after the incident but while Roberts was still alive, albeit hospitalized in a coma. That first article would have been built around the huge outpouring of love and support that overflowed the hospital intensive care unit.

Alas, we didn’t learn of this story until after his death. If the incident were such an outrageous miscarriage of justice and police incompetence at the time, why weren’t we called during the week following the incident? It would not have changed the story ultimately, but it might have tempered Roberts’ friends outrage by revealing his true gentle-while-sober character and how much he was loved as a man and respected as a musician.

Meanwhile, Bristol Tennessee police behaved more like the Keystone Cops on this case.