The Ramsey County sheriff’s office placed two longtime correctional sergeants on administrative leave last month and requested a criminal investigation into one of them.
The investigation involves an alleged violation of the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act by Sgt. Lugene Werner. Willfully violating the act is a misdemeanor and the case has been referred to the Minneapolis city attorney’s office to consider charges to avoid a conflict of interest.
The sheriff’s office put Werner on paid administrative leave Jan. 6. On Jan. 9, the sheriff’s office did the same with Sgt. Cory Hendrickson. Hendrickson is not the subject of a criminal investigation.
Former Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher said he believes the case stems from an email that Werner sent him about her concerns that a man in the Ramsey County jail was a potential terrorist.
Fletcher, who is the director of the Center for Somalia History Studies, said Werner contacted him because she attended one of the classes he teaches about terrorism and combating radicalization. He said he believes she did not she send him private information.
Werner has worked for the sheriff’s office for nearly 16 years and has no disciplinary history, said her attorney, who otherwise declined to comment. Hendrickson, a 17-year employee of the sheriff’s office, also declined to comment.
Werner had forwarded the email she sent Fletcher to Hendrickson, seemingly to notify him of her concerns because he works in the detention division that makes decisions about where to house inmates.
Sgt. John Eastham, sheriff’s office spokesman, said state law prohibits the sheriff’s office from commenting on any aspect of an active internal investigation.
Fletcher, who was Ramsey County sheriff for 16 years before being defeated by Matt Bostrom in 2010, said the inquiry into Werner only began because the sheriff’s office apparently searched all employees’ emails to see who was in contact with him.
CONNECTION TO STAFFING STUDY?
Fletcher, elected mayor of Vadnais Heights in November, said he thinks the investigation focusing on the two correctional sergeants began because he sent an email to a number of Ramsey County jail employees in December.
The message was about a staffing study — the Matrix Consulting Group report — the sheriff’s office commissioned in 2016 for $95,000.
On Dec. 22, Fletcher said he emailed sheriff’s office workers a six-page summary of recommendations from the report. He told them the report states the sheriff’s office needs 41 additional full-time positions, plus more funding for extra intermittent officers.
In the email, Fletcher said he was sending the information to them as they “attempt to convince the county board how critical additional staffing is” as a new sheriff was being named.
Bostrom announced in the beginning of December he would retire. Fletcher’s email came two days after the county board decided to interview only Jack Serier, then the chief deputy, to replace Bostrom as sheriff. The county board appointed Serier as sheriff Jan. 10.
Fletcher said sheriff’s office employees, especially those working in the jail, thought the sheriff’s administration would request additional funding for 2017 to increase staff.
Serier is due to present the staffing study to the county board in the beginning of March and they will discuss staffing needs, he told employees in a Jan. 13 email.
“They have a lot of requests for personnel and funding each year,” Serier wrote. “I want to respect the balance they have to strike with budgets and human resources across the county.”
After Fletcher emailed employees, Undersheriff Joe Paget wrote to the group and said Fletcher’s email contained information from an earlier staffing study draft.
“All of you are aware we are working hard to make the case for additional staff,” Paget wrote. “We will get there, but we do not want to compromise our operations or process along the way. Due to the importance of this undertaking, I ask that you disregard the information received from Bob Fletcher.”
Fletcher then emailed Paget, Serier and others.
“It is alarming that you would want your employees to ‘disregard’ the information contained in the Matrix staffing study that Ramsey County paid tens of thousands of dollars to conduct,” he wrote. “… The Matrix Consulting Group draft report that I forwarded to the detention staff was produced in July of 2016 — six months ago. There has been plenty of time to take action to implement or advocate for some of the needed staffing increases.”
Fletcher said he takes an interest in the issue because he’s concerned about many longtime friends who work at the sheriff’s office and since he is the mayor of a city that contracts with the sheriff’s office for police services.
Asked whether he’s positioning himself to run for sheriff in 2018, Fletcher said he doesn’t have any plans to.
INQUIRY INTO CORRECTIONAL SERGEANTS
After Fletcher emailed workers, he said he soon heard the sheriff’s administration was searching department emails to try to determine who initially sent him the staffing study, which he contends is public information. Serier has said the study contains security data that needs to be redacted.
Fletcher said the search didn’t indicate how he obtained the study, but it turned up a message that Werner sent him about an inmate. He said Werner emailed him after the man was charged with making terroristic threats in December.
The Ramsey County attorney’s office accused the man of holding a machete over his head while chasing someone in a St. Paul apartment building. The man then barricaded himself in his own apartment, stabbed the inside of his apartment door with the machete and said in Arabic that he had the “knife of God,” according to the criminal complaint.
After his arrest, the man’s girlfriend told police “he has a mental health history and that he was not taking prescribed medications,” the complaint continued.
Fletcher said the information that Werner sent him was “substantially the same information that it’s in the complaint with some additional personal observations.”
It’s possible that Werner thought he still had law enforcement officer status when she emailed him, Fletcher said. He would not comment on what he did with the information that Werner provided him.
The Minnesota Government Data Practices Act says corrections and detention data is private or confidential. It also says, “After any presentation to a court, any data made private or confidential by this section shall be public to the extent reflected in court records.”
Fletcher said he believes the sheriff’s administration may be taking a position that Hendrickson was required to report that Werner had emailed him sensitive data.