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| Second jail officer quits in wake of jail probe |
| By Tennessean |
| Published: 03/17/2004 |
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Criminal conduct by ''certain bad apples'' - other jailers - led a Wilson County, Tenn., jail officer to quit his post in response to a federal investigation into allegations of inmate abuse, he said in his resignation letter. John Wesley McKinney, who served nearly four years with the Wilson County Sheriff's Department, is the second Wilson jail guard to resign in connection with the federal probe. A third jailer is on leave while the investigation is pending. McKinney did not say in the letter what he had seen, heard or done, but wrote without elaboration of ''the felony that will forever hang above my head.'' He wrote that he did not previously know that some activity at the jail was against the law, and also did not know that his failure to tell his superiors about that activity also was illegal. Wilson County Sheriff Terry Ashe said McKinney had been interviewed by investigators ''some time back.'' But the sheriff said he wasn't aware of any specifics about McKinney's interview and did not know any results from it. Two former Wilson jailers have pleaded guilty in recent months to federal charges in connection with the inquiry. McKinney, who could not be reached by phone yesterday, has not been charged with any crime, according to the federal court system's online records system. His lengthy resignation letter, dated March 7, was requested by The Tennessean under the state's Public Records Act. In it, the officer wrote that he had recently made real his dream of being promoted to patrol officer and was attending the state police academy. But he said the achievements were ''bittersweet'' in light of the federal investigation. ''If I could have only known that some of the things that were being done in the jail by certain bad apples were felonies and that not disclosing the information to a person in the position of authority was a felony in itself, things would be much different,'' he wrote. The jail has been the object of a federal investigation into possible inmate abuse after the death of inmate Walter Steven Kuntz, 43, in January 2003. Kuntz spent a brief time in the jail after being arrested on charges of drunken driving, driving on a revoked license and leaving the scene of an accident. He died two days after being arrested by Lebanon police and being booked into the jail, which is run by the county Sheriff's Department. His death was ruled a homicide by a medical examiner. Several other civil lawsuits claiming various abuses against Wilson jail inmates have been filed in recent months. McKinney was named as a defendant in three suits. When asked about the ''bad apples'' mentioned in McKinney's letter, Ashe said: ''The people he's referring to, I don't believe are here anymore. There are 135 full-time employees and another 25 part-time volunteers. We're looking at three or four folks. It's not a fair representation of what's going on in our department. We've been into this a year, and we're changing a lot of things. This is something we're going to have to get through. And we're going to get through it.'' |
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