Sunday, July 27, 2008

Washington state school fires principal charged with child rape, questions arise concerning background investigations



By Diana Hefley and Bill Sheets,
The Daily Herald

The principal of a private Arlington school has been fired after being accused of child rape involving a student at the school.

Mark Evan Brown, 37, was placed on administrative leave from Highland Christian School after he was charged with third-degree child rape. School board members announced on Friday they were firing Brown after they learned more about the situation, according to a letter posted on the school's Web site.

The decision was made Thursday, said Linda Wallitner, the school's office manager.

"In the contract that Mark had with our office, he broke some of the rules, so they were able to let him go," Wallitner said. "It's not that we're saying he's innocent or guilty."

Brown is accused of encouraging a 14-year-old student to run away from home and offering her a place to stay at the school. The girl told detectives Brown had sexual contact with her at the school in a room he set up with a hide-a-bed and a television, according to court documents.

Detectives say Brown and the girl exchanged nearly 700 text messages and phone calls.

Brown pleaded not guilty to the rape charge Wednesday during a Snohomish County Superior Court hearing. He later was released from jail after posting $100,000 bond. School board secretary Kristin Sande released a statement after the hearing saying the board and the staff were standing behind Brown and planned to "continue to support him and his wife and his son through this ordeal he is going through."

In a letter released Friday, school board officials said they are cooperating with detectives and prosecutors. They also are conducting their own investigation, according to the letter.

"We are dedicated to continuing our investigation and discovering the full extent of this situation," the letter said. "As our inquiry progresses, the board will respond appropriately in a manner sensitive to the safety of our students and our employees."

School officials are obtaining a counselor to help students and families.

Brown has been principal at the school for three years. Before coming to the school, he was a wrestling coach at Concrete High School in Skagit County.

He was released from his coaching contract in 2004 after allegations surfaced that Brown had sexual contact with several female students at Concrete High School. The school district reported the allegations to officials at the state Department of Social and Health Services, who forwarded the complaint to the Skagit County Sheriff's Office. Sheriff's deputies opened an investigation. No charges were filed.

Snohomish County sheriff's detectives are revisiting those allegations as part of their investigation. They also have spoken to Brown's ex-wife, Casey West. She said she and Brown began dating in 1996 when she was 14 and he was 26.

The couple married in 2002. West filed for divorce in 2004. She said one reason for the split was her discovery of inappropriate text messages to Brown from a cheerleader at Concrete High School.

Highland is a state-approved private school and state law requires the school to do background investigations on employees. Information about a criminal investigation that doesn't result in a conviction, such as the case in Concrete, is not provided to school districts, according to Deborah Collinsworth with the Washington State Patrol. That sort of information is only shared with other police agencies.

Posted by Pebi Services President Tyra Hearns

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Background Investigations on prospective law enforcement officers seen as subpar by critics



By Jacob Quinn Sanders
Arkansas Democrat Gazette

The Mississippi County sheriff’s office hired Nathan Taylor in May as an auxiliary police officer not knowing he had been charged with second-degree murder and acquitted — also in Mississippi County — in 2000.

The sheriff’s office also did not know that Taylor, 31, admitted during the investigation to using methamphetamine, something he failed to acknowledge on his application.

The information was easy enough to find. The state Commission on Law Enforcement Standards and Training turned it up the same month after a routine check of the Arkansas Crime Information Center’s database after receiving Mississippi County’s paperwork on Taylor’s hiring.

But many small agencies have trouble performing background checks on new hires, standards commission Deputy Director Brian Marshall said. They don’t have the resources, he said, and often have officers who are tasked with other duties fit the checks in during down time. And those officers, he said, are often unaware of an Arkansas law requiring them to check with the standards commission as part of any background check.

To combat the issue, Marshall will soon add language to the standard initial law-enforcement hiring form, called an F-1, reminding agencies statewide of Arkansas Code Annotated 12-9-602. A subsection of that law mandates contacting the commission before making any hire that requires a state law-enforcement certification.

He described it as a superficial change, more of a service than an admonishment.

“In a smaller city, a mayor might be doing the background check himself on a new police chief or something like that and might not know about this law,” Marshall said. “In other circumstances, the officers doing the checks sometimes just don’t have the right training and so aren’t aware they have to take this step.” Marshall said he notifies agencies of information that might disqualify a potential new officer a couple of times a month.

“The folks in Mississippi County, for example, had no idea about this until we told them,” he said. “The captain I talked to was very, very thankful.” In Taylor’s case, the Mississippi County sheriff’s office fired him June 4 after finding that he made false statements on his application, records show. The sheriff ’s office recommended stripping Taylor of his certification, and the standards commission voted Thursday to hold a hearing on the matter.

Sheriff Leroy Meadows did not return a telephone message.

Sherwood Police Chief Kel Nicholson, a member of the standards commission, said thorough background checks were not open to compromise.

“It’s a burden, absolutely, but it needs to be done,” he said. “One of the ways we keep our communities safe is to make sure we’re hiring the best people we can.” Larger agencies such as the Little Rock Police Department have officers assigned specifically to perform background investigations, Marshall said.

But there are no guarantees an agency is getting all the necessary information.

When former Perry County Sheriff Ray L. Byrd was considering hiring a former Russellville police officer in 1997, he said, Russellville police failed to tell him the officer had severe emotional problems that led them to place him on a suicide watch for three consecutive shifts.

“The only thing they shared with us was that he could be pretty standoffish at times,” Byrd said in a telephone interview.

Byrd hired the officer as a deputy. Five years later, after having demoted him once, Byrd fired him after the deputy made a copy at home of a sex tape that had been stored as evidence. Byrd began to learn of the deputy’s emotional problems only after he went to the deputy’s home to fire him.

“I had to physically pry the man from around my legs,” Byrd wrote in a letter to the standards commission at the time.

Only at the deputy’s decertification hearing — six years after hiring him — did he learn of the problems in Russellville.

“I know we in this business don’t like to say something bad about a fellow officer,” Byrd said in an interview, “but sometimes there are just things people need to know. I have no idea why nobody told me about him.” At least Byrd asked the right questions, Marshall said.

“Not everybody checks,” he said. “And that’s the situation we’re trying to remedy.”

Posted by Pebi Services President Tyra Hearns

Monday, July 7, 2008

Ohio Summer Camps not inline with background investigations

Quest Soccer Camps based in Florida and looking to expand nationally have been using the services of Pebi Services to conduct background investigations on all their staff


Just 42 percent of summer day camps surveyed by Ohio's Department of Job and Family Services have completed mandatory background investigations of employees, a newspaper reported on Sunday.

But camps that fail to carry out the background investigations have little to fear. The state's Department of Job and Family Services has little recourse, since there's no real punishment provision in the state law that requires the checks, department spokesman Dennis Evans said.

Department employees last month polled 96 of the state's approximately 250 children's day camps, 70 more than it checked a year ago when the department found that nine of 26 camps had not completed the required background investigations, The Columbus Dispatch reported.

Camps must ask the state's Bureau of Criminal Identification & Investigation to do background checks on employees who have lived in Ohio for at least five years, according to state law. For workers who have lived in Ohio less than five years, checks must be done through the FBI.

Most of the camps not in compliance with state requirements were missing verification of Ohio residency, Evans said. And about 37 percent of camps hadn't requested background checks, data from the department showed. Tyra Hearns the president of background investigation firm Pebi Services currently does the background investigations for all of Quest Soccer's soccer camp employees. "Quest soccer camp is Florida's fastest growing soccer camp for children, and with their plans for expansion to other states, we felt it was prudent to conduct background investigations on all their soccer instructors and employees." said Tyra Hearns.

The department is working to strengthen its ability by next year to enforce requirements by levying fines and working with the attorney general's office to collect those fines The issue of background checks at summer camps was highlighted last summer when an Ohio church camp counselor, Timothy Stephen Keil, was charged and later convicted of molesting two young boys. Keil committed the crimes while serving as a volunteer counselor at Scioto Youth Camp, about 50 miles southeast of Columbus.

Camp officials said they didn't conduct a background check on Keil because his church, Fairfield Christian Church, said he had already passed a background check there to become a Sunday school volunteer. The church later said it wasn't able to find the records.

Keil was sentenced in Pennsylvania in 1990 to four years probation on misdemeanor charges of indecent assault and corruption of a minor.

That case inspired Republican State Sen. Steve Stivers of Columbus to sponsor a bill that would expand the department's oversight to residential summer camps, like the one where Keil worked, where children stay overnight for days and weeks at a time.

Requiring background checks, however, raises costs for the nonprofit organizations that run summer camps. A state check costs $22 a person and an FBI check costs $24, said Jennifer Brindisi, a spokeswoman at the state attorney general's office.

Posted by Pebi Services President Tyra Hearns