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Father: Deputy assaulted teenager

• A former Albany Police officer gets a warning but remains employed with the Worth County Sheriff's Office.

Susan McCord

SYLVESTER — A week’s suspension without pay and a year’s job probation is insufficient punishment for a sheriff’s deputy who “assaulted” a 16-year-old girl during a frivolous arrest at the Worth County Relay for Life, the girl’s father insists.

After the sun went down May 2 at the American Cancer Society fundraiser, his daughter and her 15-year-old boyfriend continued to hold hands as they circled the Sylvester walking track, Brian Crawley said.

But it didn’t sit well with the boy’s mother, who at around 10 p.m. summoned her brother-in-law, Deputy William C. Parker, to separate the couple, he said.

“Why didn’t he just take his nephew, put him in the car, and leave?” Crawley said.

Instead, with the boy locked in the back of the patrol car and hundreds of relay participants turning to watch, the off-duty deputy pursued the girl, “hit her from behind, threw her down to ground and picked her up by the hair,” Crawley said.

“Every word I heard from him was the f-word,” said the girl, who stands about 5-foot-3 and weighs 113 pounds.

Handcuffed, she was eventually taken to the Worth County Jail by a Sylvester police officer assigned to work at the relay.

Crawley was not present for the first encounter his daughter, a straight-A student and member of the Beta Club and flag line, had with law enforcement.

“That’s her first experience with the law,” he said. “How can she ever respect law enforcement again?”

At the jail to pick up their daughter, Parker told her parents the girl had raised her hand as if to hit him.

“His exact words to me and my wife that night was that she raised her hand at him,” Crawley said, “and that he had the right at that time to f{asterisk}{asterisk}{asterisk}ing kill her if he needed to.”

Neither the girl nor her boyfriend has been charged with a crime.

Parker began a weeklong suspension without pay the following Monday as an internal investigation into the events began, Sheriff Freddie Tompkins said Wednesday.

“We interviewed about 12-15 witnesses,” Tompkins said. “I made the decision with legal advice — one week without pay and one year’s probation. He didn’t have any priors.

“The reason was he was being unprofessional. He should have let somebody else go and handle it.”

The probation means that if Parker is “involved with something else again like that or involved with something that he’s not professional, that will give me good grounds to dismiss him,” the sheriff said.

The Georgia Peace Officer Standards and Training council confirmed that Parker did have a “prior,” though not while he was employed in Worth County.

POST Director of Operations Ryan Powell said that in 2002 POST recommended Parker’s certification be revoked completely, but eventually settled for three years’ probation.

Parker joined WCSO in 2003. He served with APD from 1997-2002, Powell said.

The reason for POST’s sanction was not available at press time.

To Crawley, Worth County’s action was inadequate.

“I don’t understand how they’d let something like this go. It’s like they didn’t really care,” he said.

Lawyers have shied away from the case because Crawley’s daughter was not seriously injured during the arrest, he said.

“I want his job, that’s all I can say,” said the father, who is raising his first teenager. “I asked them all ... Freddie Tompkins, (Chief Deputy) Bobby Sapp. I would like them to call my daughter and tell her what law she broke to have that happen.”

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