Lawsuits filed by three former Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office deputies draw a pattern of corruption and apathy in the department, two of those deputies said at a news conference Wednesday.
Brandon Walker, Phillip Hill and Nyla Coleman allege in the suits they were fired after lodging official complaints. Walker and Hill are no longer employees of the sheriff’s office after they were fired. Coleman was reinstated after more than a year appealing a decision to dishonorably discharge her from the sheriff’s office but later quit for fear of retaliation.
The sheriff’s office said in an emailed statement to KERA that the lawsuits, along with Wednesday’s news conference, are a “politically motivated attack against Sheriff Bill Waybourn and the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office.”
“This is nothing more than political grandstanding by those with an axe to grind,” the sheriff’s office said in the statement. “The sheriff’s political opponent was invited and all three former TCSO employees have pending litigation.”
The statement said it would be inappropriate to comment on pending litigation, but that law enforcement employees aren’t fired “with a wave of the hand by the sheriff” and that termination only happens after “due process indicates termination is appropriate.”
Actions by leaders in the sheriff’s office, including Sheriff Bill Waybourn, constituted retaliation and attempts to cover up crimes committed by deputies and leadership in the sheriff’s office, the former deputies said.
At the news conference Wednesday, Hill and Walker said their attempts to sound alarms within the sheriff’s office were ignored and met with negative consequences.
Hill said he raised concerns about sheriff’s deputies working closely with bond agents, commonly called bounty hunters, looking for people who had skipped bond. His supervisor used deputies under his command to assist, including in situations where those bounty hunters threatened people with arrest if they weren’t given the information they demanded.
Hill said more and more often the warrants his team was assigned to serve were bond forfeiture, which disturbed him.
“This is the only type of warrant we serve that has something to do with money,” Hill said at the news conference. “Somebody is getting paid when these warrants are being served.”
Hill said he found out his supervisor had given his number out to bounty hunters in Tarrant County.
“It became clear to me that my supervisor had built a personal relationship with many of these agents who would contact him on his personal phone,” Hill said. “He would take their calls and call the deputies that were assigned under him to go serve warrants on behalf of these bond agents.”
He said that although it was odd, though not wrong, for deputies to serve bond forfeiture warrants, the frequency worried him. Working as deputies to benefit bounty hunters didn’t seem right.
Hill said it started as deputies serving warrants on behalf of bond agents, but after a while those bounty hunters were serving the warrants with the supervisor. He became concerned about constitutional violations. The bond agents would go on private property allowed in their yards and sometimes inside their homes.
“This is an unreasonable search under the 4th Amendment, and I had a real problem with this,” Hill said.
He said most people know police can go into their home with a warrant to arrest someone.
“What people in this country don’t understand is that law enforcement would use their legal authority and convey that on civilian personnel who serve a profit motive and would allow these people to come into your home and search your home for a wanted person so that they could get paid,” Hill said.
He said he wasn’t the only person to complain about what was happening, but their concerns were brushed off. He added that it was unlawful and unethical for the sheriff’s office to use sheriff’s office vehicles and taxpayer dollars to pay deputies to help bond agents make money.
When he filed a complaint with his lieutenant, reporting the practice as illegal, unethical and disproportionately targeting people of color in Tarrant County, Hill’s supervisor filed a complaint accusing him of insubordination.
Hill said he was investigated and suspended despite no previous discipline during his time with the sheriff’s office. Hill filed a whistleblower lawsuit and said he faced immediate retaliation, including being put on less desirable assignments and eventually terminated.
Walker, a former deputy on the sheriff’s narcotics team, said he was fired from the sheriff’s office after filing a whistleblower lawsuit.
“This failure to act ultimate allowed Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Jay Allen Rotter the opportunity to commit a tragic crime: the murder of Leslie Hartman,” Walker said.
Rotter killed Hartman in their Denton home in 2020. A Denton County jury convicted him of murder in Nov. 2023 and sentenced Rotter to 30 years in prison. In a written statement provided after the news conference, Walker wrote that he “reported Rotter’s drug use and apparent psychotic episodes” before Rotter killed Hartman.
During the investigation, detectives found illegal drugs in Rotter’s home, KERA previously reported.
Tears in his eyes, Walker took a moment for a few deep breaths and said he needed to apologize to Rotter and Hartman’s families.
“I’d done all that I could do to prevent such a tragic event,” Walker said. “Jay wasn’t an evil guy as drugs make people do the damndest of things. I believe he developed an uncontrollable habit while in the Tarrant County Sheriff’s narcotics unit. The Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office failed them both by not properly investigating his drug use.”
He believes that if authorities took his complaints seriously, Hartman would still be alive today.
Walker said he reported Rotter and other “high ranking command deputies that were involved in unlawful, illegal activities.” One of the things for which Walker said he reported Rotter was using drugs on duty.
“Tarrant County never investigated my complaints but only strategically created defenses to the complaints with their fabricated evidence, fabricated statements, the destruction of evidence and the almighty perjury,” Walker said.
He said after making the report he noticed a significant change in the way he was treated by administrators and peers.
Had his complaints been taken seriously, Walker said he believes Hartman would still be alive and Rotter would have gotten help with the drug use he alleged.
“The systemic failure to address these issues had dire consequences,” Walker said.
The whistleblower lawsuit was filed before Walker’s termination and included complaints that his supervisor ordered him to conduct an unlawful search of the supervisor’s wife’s phone to investigate infidelity.
Nyla Coleman, another deputy who said she was fired after filing complaints, said she was reinstated after a year of appealing with the sheriff’s office. She said Wednesday she was dishonorably discharged, which meant she couldn’t get another job, but that she couldn’t talk more about what happened.
The Tarrant County Civil Service Commission overturned her termination and she was reinstated. She wrote that she left the agency for other employment out of fear she would face further retaliation.
This story has been updated with comments from the three former deputies and a statement from the Tarrant County Sheriff's Office.
