AG won’t probe missing guns, cash Sheriff disagrees matter is ‘internal’

MACHIAS – Guns and money may be missing from the Washington County Sheriff’s Department, but the Attorney General’s Office has declined to investigate, Sheriff Donnie Smith said Thursday.

The AG’s office has tossed the matter back in the sheriff’s lap.

“They called it an internal issue,” Smith said. “I strongly disagree.”

Smith said it would be unethical for him to conduct an internal investigation.

“I can’t internally investigate people from the past administration. How do I internally investigate people who don’t work here any more?” he asked.

When first reported in April, the sheriff’s office believed that 25 guns that should have been in an evidence locker after being confiscated in connection with different crimes were unaccounted for. That number later changed to 70 and now stands at about 45 unaccounted for, according to Smith.

Smith took over the county’s top law enforcement job in January from former Sheriff Joseph Tibbetts. Smith said the missing weapons were logged in evidence between 1995 and 2006.

After an initial inventory, Chief Deputy Michael St. Louis reported that some guns might have been returned to their original owners without being logged out of the evidence locker. Some guns might also have been destroyed without the action being documented.

But Smith asked the Attorney General’s Office in April to investigate to see if any of the weapons might have been stolen.

Former Sheriff Tibbetts maintained last spring that there were receipts for each gun when he left office.

“Unless someone has gotten rid of receipts, every firearm should be accounted for,” he said at the time. He added that he was certain the problem involved a “paper error.”

Smith said Thursday he was also upset that the AG’s office declined to investigate $450 that reportedly was stolen from the sheriff’s administrative offices.

Other than taking some envelopes to the Crime Lab, Smith said, the AG’s office did nothing else. “There has never been anybody interviewed,” he said. “There again they said it’s an internal issue. It is not. It’s the theft of county property and it should not be handled by the agency that it was stolen from. Theoretically I could be a suspect. How do I handle an investigation on myself? It just blows my mind.”

While Smith acknowledged Thursday that poor record-keeping might account for a majority of the problems involving the department’s missing guns and money, he said, “some of it is not a paper trail [issue] and for them to come to me and tell me it’s an internal issue, I strongly disagree with that,” he said.

“I wasn’t the sheriff when it took place, but I still was an employee and for me to conduct an investigation of $450 of the taxpayer’s money that was stolen out of my own agency is totally inappropriate,” Smith said.

Brian McMaster, head of Investigations Division of the Attorney General’s Office, did not return a telephone call Thursday.

Since April, the department has put procedures in place to improve record keeping, according to Smith.

Now deputies are required to log confiscated guns into a record book they carry with them. After that the deputy and another officer document the weapon in the master logbook in the evidence locker. The new policy also requires that two officers log the weapon out when it is returned to its owner. There also is a procedure in place to return a gun to its owner, if appropriate, once a case is closed. The case officer has to be the one who returns the weapon to the owner.

The chief deputy also is responsible for regularly inventorying the evidence locker.