Healing May Take Some Time
June 10, 2017 at 4:43 a.m.
By Gary [email protected]
It wasn’t long before I met former Sheriff Al Rovenstine, who was re-elected in 1991. It wasn’t long after that when I met his son, Aaron Rovenstine, our sheriff, who pleaded guilty to a felony on May 23.
I have known them both for nearly 30 years. Mainly, though professional interactions because of our positions in the community.
I know they are good people. This is an opinion column. Opinions vary. This is my opinion. I will be blunt.
The notion that the Rovenstines have subjected this county to some sort of “culture of corruption” is patently asinine.
There’s a reason they were elected and re-elected over all these years. The people of this county trusted them. Believed in them. Their officers believed in them – and still do. You would be hard pressed to find one person in the county building who would say bad things about them.
This corruption notion was foisted upon anyone who would listen by a prosecutor from another county during a press conference following our sheriff’s sentencing.
He used the word “corruption,” yet never bothered to show – or even suggest that there was – evidence of any such corruption.
He must have been referring to the case where he just pleaded 10 felonies down to one. Beyond that, he had no idea what he was talking about. And even in that case, the evidence of “corruption” was nonexistent.
That case, of course, was our sheriff’s case. The one where he was indicted for “agreeing to accept” bribes. Not accepting bribes, mind you. Agreeing to accept bribes.
Of course, this was a fine distinction lost on virtually every media outlet in northern Indiana which dutifully reported that our county sheriff “accepted bribes” to the tune of $40,000.
Never mind that he never did. Never mind that the indictment never accused him of that. And never mind that no money ever exchanged hands.
The “bribe” part of the case grew out of an inmate’s hollow offer to include the sheriff – and many other people around town, for that matter – in his will. He promised to lavish all these people with literally millions of dollars.
Problem is, he had no money. This was an inmate who the sheriff, in his decades of law enforcement experience in this county, had contact with numerous times.
Why?
Because the guy was in the Kosciusko County Jail’s frequent flier program. He had no money. Everybody knew he had no money. The idea that he could come up with tens of thousands of dollars to bribe anybody – or that anybody would believe he had tens of thousands of dollars in the first place – is laughably absurd and impossible to prove in court.
Which is probably why the prosecution was willing to drop all the charges connected with the “bribery” part of the indictment.
But never mind. The vast majority of people in the northern half of the state and beyond think the sheriff accepted money because it was so widely – and incorrectly – reported.
Now, of course, those same people all believe the charges were dropped and sheriff just “got off easy.”
Then there was the intimidation part of the indictment.
I was disappointed when our sheriff decided to plead guilty to a single count of felony intimidation. My sense of it is he ran out of money and saw it as a way to get the whole mess behind him.
I was looking forward to hearing all the testimony in this case.
I suppose one could argue that by the letter of the law a felony occurred. That’s if a cop saying things like “I dont wanna start World War III, because everybody’s gonna lose,” “This will be ugly” and “I’m the sheriff, I have investigators, too,” to another cop is a felony.
Bad judgment? Check.
Lapse in professional etiquette? Check.
Lack of professional courtesy? Check.
Just plain bad behavior? Check.
But a felony?
I’m fairly confident the prosecution could never have convinced a jury – beyond a reasonable doubt – that a felony intimidation occurred in this case.
It seems to me this was a disagreement between two veteran cops that should have been settled over a couple of beers. Instead, it turned into a career-ending, life-altering, reputation-ruining fiasco.
While our sheriff wasn’t completely innocent in this mess, I just really have a hard time believing he committed a felony.
Lots of people are calling for healing between the city and county departments. That’s a good thing and my fondest hope is for that to happen.
But my sense of it is that there will be hard feelings over this episode for a long, long time.
*****
An issue that surfaced this week also had me shaking my head.
A former city councilman, Kyle Babcock, has a blog.
Babcock decided that it was a bad thing that people donated anonymously to the city’s Alley Activation Project.
That’s the project where the city agreed to spruce up the alley between the city building and the building housing Three Crowns coffee shop and Oak & Alley, a restaurant and bar.
A crowdsourcing campaign was initiated so the city could get matching funds.
More than $50K was raised and the city got the match. The total cost of the project was more than $100K.
Babcock requested a list of donors, which the city supplied, minus the ones who wished to be anonymous. State law allows people to make anonymous donations to municipalities for obvious reasons.
What part of “anonymous donor” is difficult to understand? If the donor can’t be anonymous, he or she won’t be a donor.
But Babcock tries to turn this into some sort of surreptitious skulduggery on the part of the city, posting stuff like this online: “The Warsaw Clerk Treasurer and Warsaw Mayor Joe Thallemer refuse to provide a list of the 54 Anonymous Donors to the Alley Project: What are they hiding?”
Well, I suppose that makes a good sensational blog post, but come on. Seriously?
First of all, it’s just flat wrong. There weren’t 54 anonymous donors – there were 16.
And how much did these 16 donors contribute? $2,150. There’s just nothing untoward about this.
It’s a classic case of the reporter making himself the story.
And now Babcock says he will fight for legislation to prohibit these vexatious anonymous donations.
Good luck with that.
It wasn’t long before I met former Sheriff Al Rovenstine, who was re-elected in 1991. It wasn’t long after that when I met his son, Aaron Rovenstine, our sheriff, who pleaded guilty to a felony on May 23.
I have known them both for nearly 30 years. Mainly, though professional interactions because of our positions in the community.
I know they are good people. This is an opinion column. Opinions vary. This is my opinion. I will be blunt.
The notion that the Rovenstines have subjected this county to some sort of “culture of corruption” is patently asinine.
There’s a reason they were elected and re-elected over all these years. The people of this county trusted them. Believed in them. Their officers believed in them – and still do. You would be hard pressed to find one person in the county building who would say bad things about them.
This corruption notion was foisted upon anyone who would listen by a prosecutor from another county during a press conference following our sheriff’s sentencing.
He used the word “corruption,” yet never bothered to show – or even suggest that there was – evidence of any such corruption.
He must have been referring to the case where he just pleaded 10 felonies down to one. Beyond that, he had no idea what he was talking about. And even in that case, the evidence of “corruption” was nonexistent.
That case, of course, was our sheriff’s case. The one where he was indicted for “agreeing to accept” bribes. Not accepting bribes, mind you. Agreeing to accept bribes.
Of course, this was a fine distinction lost on virtually every media outlet in northern Indiana which dutifully reported that our county sheriff “accepted bribes” to the tune of $40,000.
Never mind that he never did. Never mind that the indictment never accused him of that. And never mind that no money ever exchanged hands.
The “bribe” part of the case grew out of an inmate’s hollow offer to include the sheriff – and many other people around town, for that matter – in his will. He promised to lavish all these people with literally millions of dollars.
Problem is, he had no money. This was an inmate who the sheriff, in his decades of law enforcement experience in this county, had contact with numerous times.
Why?
Because the guy was in the Kosciusko County Jail’s frequent flier program. He had no money. Everybody knew he had no money. The idea that he could come up with tens of thousands of dollars to bribe anybody – or that anybody would believe he had tens of thousands of dollars in the first place – is laughably absurd and impossible to prove in court.
Which is probably why the prosecution was willing to drop all the charges connected with the “bribery” part of the indictment.
But never mind. The vast majority of people in the northern half of the state and beyond think the sheriff accepted money because it was so widely – and incorrectly – reported.
Now, of course, those same people all believe the charges were dropped and sheriff just “got off easy.”
Then there was the intimidation part of the indictment.
I was disappointed when our sheriff decided to plead guilty to a single count of felony intimidation. My sense of it is he ran out of money and saw it as a way to get the whole mess behind him.
I was looking forward to hearing all the testimony in this case.
I suppose one could argue that by the letter of the law a felony occurred. That’s if a cop saying things like “I dont wanna start World War III, because everybody’s gonna lose,” “This will be ugly” and “I’m the sheriff, I have investigators, too,” to another cop is a felony.
Bad judgment? Check.
Lapse in professional etiquette? Check.
Lack of professional courtesy? Check.
Just plain bad behavior? Check.
But a felony?
I’m fairly confident the prosecution could never have convinced a jury – beyond a reasonable doubt – that a felony intimidation occurred in this case.
It seems to me this was a disagreement between two veteran cops that should have been settled over a couple of beers. Instead, it turned into a career-ending, life-altering, reputation-ruining fiasco.
While our sheriff wasn’t completely innocent in this mess, I just really have a hard time believing he committed a felony.
Lots of people are calling for healing between the city and county departments. That’s a good thing and my fondest hope is for that to happen.
But my sense of it is that there will be hard feelings over this episode for a long, long time.
*****
An issue that surfaced this week also had me shaking my head.
A former city councilman, Kyle Babcock, has a blog.
Babcock decided that it was a bad thing that people donated anonymously to the city’s Alley Activation Project.
That’s the project where the city agreed to spruce up the alley between the city building and the building housing Three Crowns coffee shop and Oak & Alley, a restaurant and bar.
A crowdsourcing campaign was initiated so the city could get matching funds.
More than $50K was raised and the city got the match. The total cost of the project was more than $100K.
Babcock requested a list of donors, which the city supplied, minus the ones who wished to be anonymous. State law allows people to make anonymous donations to municipalities for obvious reasons.
What part of “anonymous donor” is difficult to understand? If the donor can’t be anonymous, he or she won’t be a donor.
But Babcock tries to turn this into some sort of surreptitious skulduggery on the part of the city, posting stuff like this online: “The Warsaw Clerk Treasurer and Warsaw Mayor Joe Thallemer refuse to provide a list of the 54 Anonymous Donors to the Alley Project: What are they hiding?”
Well, I suppose that makes a good sensational blog post, but come on. Seriously?
First of all, it’s just flat wrong. There weren’t 54 anonymous donors – there were 16.
And how much did these 16 donors contribute? $2,150. There’s just nothing untoward about this.
It’s a classic case of the reporter making himself the story.
And now Babcock says he will fight for legislation to prohibit these vexatious anonymous donations.
Good luck with that.
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