Where'd Todd Go?...
On Dealing With Psychopaths and Stalking
Chapter 10 - WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN A COP GOES BAD? ON DETECTIVE JOSEPH MAYO GAINESVILLE POLICE DEPARTMENT
SUMMARY: Detective Joseph Mayo, of the Gainesville Police Department, after some inappropriate interference from the then newly appointed Emergency Manager, Dave Donnelly, who suggested to him that I was attempting to use the law to harass innocent people who were his personal friends, deliberately sabotaged an ongoing criminal investigation into cyberstalking and harassment on the part of Melissa Royce (and possibly her husband Philip too), who had sent me a harassing email using my own forged name at Yahoo to advise me that "changes were coming soon for Alachua County SKYWARN", and who had forged business cards touting herself as the new "Coordinator" of Alachua County SKYWARN and had used them to dupe the local Emergency Management office and con them into attempting to take over control of ACS. (Was that too much? Wanna read that again?...)
There's a scene in Cape Fear where a lawyer (Sam), stalked and harassed by an ex-convict, is consulting with a private detective...
Sam (upset): "...I mean why can't anybody do anything for me?! What, what good are cops and laws and due process?!!...
Detective (holding up his hand): "Sam, Sam, Sam... Lem'me explain something to you. See, the system is set up to handle generalized problems like burglary and robbery...but if some lone creep out there targets you for some obscure reason...the system's slow and skeptical. It's pathetic, even..."
I went to the Gainesville Police Department to try to get some help protecting myself against people who were stalking and harassing me. But my stalkers just ended up giving me a play-by-play of all of the yet-unpublished details about my case four months before the case was actually closed, torturing me with intimite details of the case that had apparently been shared personally with the very people who were supposed to be under investigation by the cop assigned to the case.
The reason the cop had apparently done this was because -- according to my lead stalker who bragged it to me while he and I were up on top of the J.H. Miller Health Science Center rooftop one day -- the local Emergency Manager had inappropriately told the officer that I was attempting to use the law to "stalk and harass innocent people". Those "innocent people" being some ham radio operators with which the EM had happened to work together with sometimes in some public service activities in the past. The Emergency Manager in fact had no facts or evidence to support that claim. Basically, I guess he picked a favorite. "Eenie-meenie-miney-moe. You're it." Right? When you consider that in all of the time that he had ever worked with me himself the EM had never had any problems with me (or vice-versa), it seems strange for him to suddenly turncoat like that. What could the hams have said to him to effect such a drastic change of mind towards me?
Header information from a harassing email sent me contained IP information pointing back to the personal ham radio web page of a husband and wife who had in the past been involved in stalking behavior towards me. To send it, they went to Yahoo, forged a new account using my name (spelled incorrectly), and composed a message promising changes coming soon for Alachua County Skywarn. Then the account was deleted in an apparent attempt to try to thwart anyone from finding out who the sender was. (Whoever did it must not have understood how things actually worked at Yahoo, though.) At the same time, a group of ham radio operators, including that husband and wife team, were apparently "working" local emergency management, trying to convince them to take over Alachua County Skywarn. Incredibly, emergency management jumped on the takeover idea without any questions first. There was no prior communication effort made between ACOEM and ACS. Meanwhile, the wife was also attempting to take classes to become an Emergency Manager, herself. And just to put icing on the cake, the husband worked with ASO in the Mobile Services Division too, repairing their mobile radios.
The wife had been a malicious problem in the past. On asking for the husband's help in controlling his wife's behavior, the husband instead took offense and became beligerent. Word from Jeff Capehart suggested that the husband then began engaging on a strong disinformation campaign against me with EM and NWS employees in order to discredit me so as to divert attention away from the problems that his wife was causing.
After the conversation with the Emergency Manager, the cop decided to do the him (and defacto, my stalkers) the "favor" of deliberately delaying the accumulation of easily obtainable physical evidence which would have identified who had sent the email. ...At least, delayed until an expiration point had come and gone six months after the event, after which the evidence was destroyed by the companies in possession of it (Bellsouth and Yahoo). In other words, a local officer, violating quite a number of my Constitutional rights, felt that because an Emergency Manager, wearing a shirt with a logo on it, had said that I was using the law to harass, that this must therefore be true - with no challenge under the law being necessary. And therefore, he felt that he was allowed to violate the Constitution with impunity because it seemed to be backed up by "an official who worked for an official local agency."
Remember that scene in The Silence of the Lambs?...
Jack Crawford: "Hey Starling. When I...when I told that sheriff we shouldn't talk in front of a woman, it really burned you. Didn't it?" (pause) "...It was just smoke, Starling. I had to get rid of 'im."
Starling: "It matters, Mr. Crawford. Cops look at you to see how to act. It matters."
Jack Crawford: "Point taken.
While the above scene seems to be about gender inequality the actual underlying point remains the same. Someone in a position of authority implied to someone in another lower position that I was neither "legitimite", nor should I be taken seriously. Detective Mayo's negative reaction towards me was based solely and implicitely upon the condescending tone that the senior Emergency Manager had inappropriately set; and from that point on, Due Process and Civil Rights no longer mattered. To the cop, I was the bad guy now, plain and simple. Mr. Donnelly's opinion should not have mattered at all. And it was irresponsible and completely unprofessional conduct and had no business being considered at all by the Gainesville Police Department except as a personal opinion which may or may not be true - unless ACOEM was willing to go officially and publicly on the record with that statement. But it was not. The EM's statement to the officer was intended to remain unpublicised, hidden, unofficial, but still taken into consideration enough to cause the officer to react, without any official acknowledgement of why. It was an illicit interference by the Alachua County Office of Emergency Management in a real, ongoing criminal case; and the EM's personal opinion actually adversely affected the outcome of that investigation. Because in the end all that mattered after that was that Mr. Sherman was the bad guy, and the people he was filing internal and criminal complaints about were not. ...At least as far as the EM had laid it out. And from there, Standard Operating Procedures Manuals, Codes and State Statutes, and Rules of Civil and Criminal Procedure...none of that mattered any longer. And as far as they were concerned it had nothing to do with the new agenda at hand which was...protecting the ham radio operators. To put it in another way...this was an act of endangerment. The EM had no idea if he was right or not. He presented no facts or evidence. Therefore, he had no idea if I was actually in danger of being stalked further or not. And yet, he stated matter-of-factly to an officer of the law that I was just using the law to harass, causing that officer to destroy the case, and thus my ability to defend myself or to make it stop. If it sounds kinda harsh, I'm not concerned. If the offending emergency manager doesn't like it he is welcome to take me into a civil or criminal courtroom where we can all have a big and very public Pow Wow about it. Either courtroom will do. It does not matter to me. He had no right to interfere like that and to deliberately try to prevent due process and the 6th and 14th Amendments their fair chance.
Bizarrely, the officer even tried to blame it on an attorney at the Gainesville State Attorney's Office, citing that Attorney Lee Libby had told him that "...this looks more like a civil than a criminal case." But there was no explanation of how my case looked more civil than criminal. He did not offer me up a transcript of the description that he had given to Atty. Libby (if he had even engaged in an actual conversation with him at all). But on contacting Libby after the case was closed, Libby had no memory of such a thing. Obviously Mayo thought I was just supposed to take that answer, shut up, and go away.
Yah, that's it. Let's implicate an attorney at the Gainesville SAO of involvement in a crime. Genius maneuver if ever there was one. [Points finger at somebody else] "HE TOLD ME TO DO IT!" Sounds like that's a valid cop defense. Right? Except that...if challenged, there's no way that the emergency manager or Asst. State Attorney Lee Libby are going to admit to any of that, and thus, destroy their careers and put themselves at risk of arrest and incarceration. So in actuality, this officer is now left out in the cold open by his own hand, fending for himself on his own for a pretty serious wanton violative action taken involving evidence tampering, evidence destruction, and obstruction of justice, and even forcing a situation of endangerment towards another. And you can bet there was nothing in print or in verbal command to officially (or even logically) authorize it. Far too often officers take shortcut actions such as these believing that their uniforms give them the power and the authority to act without having to offer explanation or even to have to answer to the law themselves -- for the good of the "well-intended" end result. Right? As a result, my case was completely and utterly destroyed, and my stalking nightmares only got worse. Regardless of what the officer may have thought he was doing, the officer had only succeeded in deliberate case destruction, and in endangering me further...because he'd failed to take my complaint seriously.
So who the hell is this "cop", anyway?
Detective Joseph Mayo, of the Gainesville Police Dept., was the detective who was assigned to a harassment case that I had filed in 2006. Someone had sent me a harassing email. At first the case was against unknowns because we weren't sure who had actually sent the email. But when the email's header information was checked out with greater scrutiny, it later pointed to a husband and wife team - Philip and Melissa Royce. The "originating IP", when plugged into a browser, took you to Philip Royce's personal ham radio web page...or more accurately, to an IP address belonging to Phil and Melissa Royce. "Phil" also happened to work for the Alachua County Sheriffs Office, in the mobile comminications division, repairing the radios of the mobile units, I was told. (Did I just hear you say "Oh, no!", right there? Yah. It definitely came into play, later on.)
At the same time, unknown to me, apparently Melissa Royce had been working very hard on local Emergency Management leaders trying to convince them that I was handing an organization that I'd founded, called "Alachua County SKYWARN", over to her, and that I had made her the new "Coordinator" of that organization. Apparently, she had also told them that I had asked her to look into making ACS a physical part of ACOEM. No one had bothered to contact me to confirm it. Emergency Management allowed Melissa to even go as far as to draw up an actual "Standard Operating Procedures Manual" which dictated how ACS was going to be run - under the ownership and control of the Alachua County Office of Emergency Management. All of this effort was kept from me, and I had no idea at all that it was even going on. (It was relayed to me by Jeff Capehart some time after it was already starting to go down. ...Jeff Capehart. The man who always seems to have his finger on everybody's pulse and who no one ever thinks to question him about how he knows these things.)
Not long after that had begun, and presumably after receiving some positive feedback to start the takeover process at ACOEM, is when someone then apparently opened up a Yahoo account using my name (spelled incorrectly), sent the harassing email, and then immediately deleted the Yahoo account in order to erase the evidence. It seemed to be threatening Alachua County SKYWARN. The email contained no threats of physical harm, but mentioned "changes coming soon" for the organization, itself. ...It came on the heels of years worth of stalking and harassment by multiple area hams. And I was tired of it, and wanted it to stop.
Desperate, I'd already warned people in ham radio, EM, and NWS circles that if the stalking didn't stop I was going to be forced to go to the police 1) so as to start putting things into the official record, and 2) to start filing real charges against people. The stalking was so bad that it was getting to the point where I felt it was necessary to set some public examples and put the fear of God into people, because there didn't seem to be any real serious consequences out there to make anyone think twice about what they were doing. They were only getting bolder and bolder in what they were pulling. I was willing to do whatever it took to make all of this ridiculousness stop. After all, that is exactly the procedure recommended by the police to do whenever you are stalked and harassed: document, and press charges. Right? Even Dave Donnelly, then the Asst. Emergency Manager at the Alachua County Office of Emergency Management, told me when I had a meet with him at Big Lou's Pizzeria about the situation that "If people are stalking and harassing you, then you need to go to the police about it." Now...remember that. Okay?...
So when this happened, I did just that. I filed a complaint at GPD. I just needed Det. Mayo to subpoena the IP logs from Bellsouth and Yahoo - a very simple task, to confirm the IP information in the email header which, when actually checked, pointed to Philip Royce/KE4PWE's personal web page. I needed this in order to prove that the header information in the email was not forged or made up, and to prove that the apparently header-indicated origination point was the actual-in-fact origination point. This is in fact what Mayo at the beginning suggested to me and told me that he was going to do, while simultaneously bragging to me about how "good" he was. I needed to verify it, back it up with logs from an outside, third party source. That was the detective's only mission. It was very simple. It required no effort except to fill out a form that didn't even require a judge's signature on it to effect it, and submit it to the service providers.
At some point during the investigation Dave Donnelly implied to Mayo that I was a problem and then the investigating officer deliberately avoided obtaining important documentation which would have helped to solve the case and allowed me to prove definitively who had sent the harassing email, and maybe might have helped to stop any further ensuing stalking and harassment.
I found that out because word of it was eventually bragged to me midway through the case by one of my stalkers, Jeff Cepahart, while he and I were removing ground station equipment from the JHMHSC rooftop, mentioned above. When I tried to complain to the Faculty Advisor of Gator Amateur Radio Club, Dr. Jay Garlitz, about how some of the members were stalking and harassing me, instead of showing concern, or making any effort to help, he instead told me that he wanted me to remove all of our ground station equipment from the rooftop. I was making waves, I guess, so he decided that rather than tackle the problem head-on, it was just easier to get rid of the victim than deal with the troublemakers. But before I was allowed access to the rooftop to claim that equipment, lawyers from the University of Florida forced me to sign an agreement saying that I promised not to sue or to file any complaints. I was REFUSED access to the rooftop UNTIL I signed that document. The document signing date and the subsequent time of first access to the rooftop prove that. They kept the 4-bay dipole transmitting antenna for years, until it stopped working for them one day and then they told me I could have it back. I never did get the 200 feet of 9913 hardline coax that also belonged to us. The reaction from Dr. Garlitz hurt. It was a complete surprise. Jay had always been nice to me, even worked on my teeth before. And he'd never had any problem from me. I'd always thought of him as a nice person, very respectable. But his decision to refuse any investigation, any reporting of problems up the chain, to side with the bad guys, and to blame the victim instead...that hurt a lot. And in so doing, the victim was victimized, yet again.
Jeff told me that Det. Mayo had shared everything about my case to the two very people that the on-hand evidence had been pointing to, and who had ultimately become the focus of the investigation - Phil and Melissa Royce. Jeff told me that Det. Mayo was just saying everything that he thought I wanted to hear, and that he was deliberately delaying getting anything done. (And you know what? I'd even warned Mayo to watch out for Capehart...told him that Capehart was slick and quick and could easily become a problem if given the slightest amount of trust and leeway. And be damned if here Capehart now is, proving me correct...now with Mayo in the crosshairs because of Jeff's psychopathic braggadochio about what he knew of what the detective did.)
What was shocking was that I'd said absolutely nothing to Jeff at all about what was going on with the case and he seemed to have all the intimate details of it...what was said, who was mentioned, what was said in emails to the detective, how many emails were sent to the detective...everything. And he was bragging it to me with such obvious pride in his voice at having the upper hand over me. It was creepy and surreal.
"You know he's just saying what you want to hear. Right? He said he's gonna keep yanking your chains until the six-month time period is up for the IP logs - you know, when BellSouth and Yahoo delete them - and then he's gonna close the case on you."
"Bullshit, Jeff!", I said, trying to make him feel like he's got one up on me, egging him to go on with even more information. (See if there's one guarantee with bullies, it's in their sadistic want to cause their victims constant pain and suffering; an obesssive compulsive desire to kick that beaten, bloodied puppy one more time, and oh just one more, even when it's prudent to stop and run away before any witnesses come.) "Oh, B.S. How do you know all of this, Jeff? Where did you hear all of this from? Yah, I don't believe you!"
(THAT worked... :) )
"How do you think?!!! I got it from Phil and Melissa Royce, and they have big mouths. You know that! They can't keep a secret and they have to brag!" (I'm thinking, "You mean just like you...now?" See, if there's yet another consistent thing about psychopaths it's in their want to achieve acclaim for their deeds, and to brag about what they did. It's a guarantee with psychopaths. You can bank on it; almost set a stopwatch to its inevitability, and use it to your advantage if you're quick, and careful.)
"What did I tell you about 'networking?!' WHAT DID I TELL YOU?!!! ...It's all in who you know! You don't know JACK! You don't know anyone important. I know everybody! I've made sure that I know everybody who matters, and that I've placed myself in all the right places that matter. Did you do that?! NO! Hey, I tried to tell you! No one is going to believe you! I warned you about that the very first time you said you were going to go to the police, now! Didn't I?!!!"
"Yah, but how the hell did Phil and Melissa know about what the cop said?"
"How do you think? Did you tell the cop to talk to Dave (Donnelly)?"
There was a pause in me at the realization of where he was starting to go. But I had to recover quickly and give him something to make him continue. I lowered my voice a little to deliberately make myself sound a little "beaten", with a hint at being close to tears thrown in there for good measure to hook him in...
"Yah. But only insofar as for confirmation that I'd even gone to people in emergency management to complain about the stalking and harassments, and..."
"...Yah well, the cop called Dave, alright. And then Dave told him that you were just trying to use the law to stalk and harass innocent people. And now he's going to make the case go away for Dave as a favor. So all of this effort you just made didn't do you much good. ...DID it?"
...That was where my jaw dropped. I caught myself looking downward a little and I could feel my face contorting and my eyebrows bending and the blood rushing to my face. That one actually hurt - pretty badly to be honest. It quickly turned to anger. There was a long pause. And he noticed it. I could feel it. He knew he had finally lobbed the good one in.
"So, did you get everything that you needed out of this conversation? Is there anything else I can help you with?"
Staring at the ground with my jaw still agape, I remember shaking my head a few times, not in answer to him mind you, but in frustration, and in disbelief at how far this whole thing had ended up going. It was exasperating dealing with this guy; with all of them. I think I sighed. There the conversation ended.
I was standing next to a railing at the edge of the rooftop when Jeff was telling me all of this with this proud little grin on his face. You could see over the side of the building straight down, and the drop from that point is 163 feet. A chill went up my spine as he spoke, and I found myself moving away from the railing.
Jeff chuckled as I did.
It was another one of those moments with him when I again realized that I wasn't dealing with a normal person, here. There's a twisted, sadistic side to him. You could hear it in his voice. He was...proud. Proud of his genius, proud of his ability to manipulate so many people, and of how he was able to affect the decisions of so many people. And it didn't seem to matter whether they wore shirts with logos or not. It didn't matter who you were. Everyone believed him when he spoke. He's that convincing. He'll tell you complete bullshit and you'll be an expert in whatever field, and he'll have you cowering and shaking your head in agreement because you don't want to look stupid. He's like that.
But here, that day, there were no lies. He was telling me everything. There were no cameras on the rooftop. Nothing monitoring what's happening up there. He could say whatever he wanted, admit whatever he liked. There would be no evidence of the conversation. Just a log somewhere saying that he and I were on the rooftop for so long, and when we signed out. Jeff could have gotten away with pushing me off the rooftop if he wanted to. No one would have seen it. He could have simply said I tripped on a crumpled area of rooftop and fell over the rail and no one would question him. Everyone trusts him implicitely.
Do you know how scary it is to hear your stalker tell you all about your case - all the intimate details that he SHOULD NOT KNOW - right back to your face?! This isn't supposed to happen to you in real life. This only happens on TV and in the movies...to the bad guys. You know. ...To the asshole senator. ...To the evil spy. It's not supposed to happen to real people, innocent people, who didn't do a anything to anyone.
There was nothing that I could do about that now, though. I had to continue onwards without clueing Mayo in that I knew something, or else Mayo might panic and try to sabotage the case and close it before I could have a chance to think of what, if anything, that I could do about it. Still, Jeff could tell Phil and/or Melissa about the conversation and then they could still relay that information back to Donnelly, who might relay it to Mayo. But I had to continue as if that wouldn't happen. I had to continue to try, even though it now seemed really like a lost situation.
Again, Mayo had one job: to subpoena the IP logs from Bellsouth and Yahoo. He had six months to do it and all I got were excuses. He never called me; I always had to call him. He never had time. He was always out to a seminar, a meeting, a class, or something. He always feigned interest, and in the very beginning even promised that he was the best; but his voice betrayed otherwise. It sounded...acted. And I...suspected he wasn't being forthright with me from almost the very beginning. His brag of being the best...in my gut, it felt like patronizing pretense to me. And it wasn't long before he was constantly telling me that "it would probably be better just to drop the case". "Are you sure you don't want to just drop the case, Mr. Sherman?" Like a broken record. He just wouldn't stop saying that. I never felt comfortable talking to him, or like I didn't have to worry. His voice was always condescending and I always felt like I was really screwing up his day, putting him out. At one point he even said that he was busy on lots of cases and that he was working on cases which were "frankly, a lot more more important than yours." That one took me aback. He took so long to get anything done. But he wasn't actually getting anything done. He was just pretending. In the end, he lied to me and told me that he had obtained the IP logs and that it looked like there was "a lot of anonymizing and spoofing going on". I called him back and asked him to make copies of them for me so that I could bring them to other expert witnesses that I know to analyze, themselves.
I think that one shook him up. I think he was finally starting to catch on that I knew something. Because...
On February 21st, 2007, at 1:35 PM, Mayo called me back and left me a very weird voicemail which tried to explain rather fumblingly why he didn't actually have any logs, and something else...
Uhm. Well. I've got bad news for you. I've, I thought the case, originally, when I
got it and read it and everything, uhm, you know, and received your, your paperwork,
that it was civil.
I contacted, ahh...I finally did get a hold of the State Attorney's Office. We
reviewed the case annnd, in fact, they also say it's a civil case. Which of
course, they're the last word on this....(breath)...issue. (breath)
I've reviewed the case also with my supervisor and he also advised that, uhm, it was
civil. He didn't have, uhh, (breath), you know, any other objections, or anything
like that, or anything like that, uhh, contrary opinions.
So, I'm sorry to say sir, the case is...being...closed. Uhh. Uhm. There's
nothing I can do. Once a State Attorney basically, uhh, has said that it's a civil
matter - and also, you know, I think it is a civil case...uhm...There's nothing else
I can do on this matter. Okay sir? Uhh. Take care.
Oh and when I told you that I had received, uhhhm...(long pause)...the uhm...(long
pause)...subpoenaes concerning the headers and what not and everything, I was
mistaken, annnnd, I confused your case with another case. I work, I've got forty
or fifty of these cases, at least...and I confused your case with someone else's
case. Okay sir? Uhm...that involved...uhm...the same companies. Okay. So, and,
I'm constantly dealing with, uhm, the same companies, also.
So, I'm sorry but I did confuse the, uhm, your, uhm, header information and subpoena
and information that I got from them with another...case. Okay? And uhm, sorry about
the bad news, sir.
Take care. Bye.
And there it was...just as Capehart had told me months earlier. He was closing my case -- with not a thing done, nothing subpoenaed, not a single person interviewed, not a bit of homework done. He wasn't even concerned enough to try to make it look good on the way out...to even make it appear as if he'd tried to do a good job. It didn't matter to him. It didn't bother him at all.
So now what do I do? Do I just let it go in resignation and defeat? Do I let them go without a fight?...without a challenge? Oh, hell no. NOT gonna happen...
I called him back as soon as I'd read the voicemail. I asked him to explain to me again why he didn't have the IP logs that he'd said he'd subpoenaed. He again said that he had been pulling the wrong case file - that he had continually pulled someone else's case file, accidentally.
Wait. ...WHAT?!! That just didn't make any sense.
I said "...FOR SIX MONTHS?!!!"
"Yes."
"So you're trying to tell me that...you pulled from the incorrect case file...but repeatedly, over and over and over, every time we'd exchanged an email, or a phone call, for six months in a row?"
There was another long pause making it really obvious that this guy was lieing to me, and that he was trying to think ahead of me. But he was failing quite miserably and he wasn't very good at it.
"Uhm...Yes, Mr. Sherman", he said.
There was such a casual, unemotional indifference in his voice.
But when he continued on some more, he finally started to drop the pretensions and admitted to me that he had never subpoenaed the logs; that he never intended to subpoena the logs "because the State Atty's Office had always said that it appeared to be a civil matter rather than a criminal case." (This actually has nothing to do with subpoenaing logs. ...If anything, only which courtroom you're going to hold a case in. I know what he was trying to get me to believe but I knew too much and he didn't realize it. He was BS'ing me and I knew it. Civil or Criminal, both situations require these logs, and the only people who can obtain them are cops with subpoenas. So what the SAO had to say about which courtroom he thought the case should appear in was really nonsequitor and would have still required that the logs be garnered. So, Mayo's BS wasn't working with me, there.)
And did you notice how he'd used the word "always", in there? That's important in a sec, here.
So in one breath he's telling me he'd been pulling logs from the wrong case file, and in the next, that he never subpoenaed the logs ever, and never intended to. This man is just NOT a good liar, or he just felt that it really didn't matter and like he had all the power and I wasn't going to be able to do anything about it anyway. And the latter is probably the more accurate.
(sigh) I knew he was working to destroy the case and there was nothing that I could do about it. You don't know what a suck feeling that is...to have to hold all that inside and keep a secret so that you're not clueing the bad cop in that you know what he's doing to you. I'll admit...I seriously thought about suicide at times throughout all of this.
I put him up against the wall and asked him when he had told the SA's Office about this. He hemmed and hawwed and coughed, and used "...uhm..." a lot. I had to repeatedly ask the question, and push the answer out of him. I did it deliberately so as to force him off balance so that he didn't have time to make something up, or get the idea to hang up. (...Which...he really should have done at this point. LOL.) Finally, he told me that he had only just asked them "recently".
...Recently. ...Not at the beginning. ...Not at the middle. ...But just before he closed the case.
Did you catch what just happened here? First he implied that the attorney had told him that six months ago, and that that's why he never subpoenaed the logs. NOW he's saying that he was only recently told by the attorney that it looked like a civil case, which cancels out the previous thinking and makes it not possible. There's no way then that a decision told him at the very end could have in any possibility affected his decision six months previously. So...he was lieing about that, and I'd just caught him at it. And he didn't realize it.
Continuing the deliberately quick pace, I asked him who he had talked to at the SAO. Again, he stuttered and paused as if trying to think of what to say. ...As if......as if he was trying to quickly rationalize whether or not it was a wise idea or not to reveal this guy's name, and whether or not it might come back to bite him in the ass, later on; but he knew that he had to say something quickly or else it sounded like he was delaying. And he didn't want to let me in on that. (I've actually got a cop locked in real hard thought about how to con a guy who is himself working very hard at trying to con him out of a confession without realizing it, himself. I've actually got a cop locked in real hard thought about how to best continue his little crime here, and I knew that.) And I could feel all that in his voice. I kept the pressure on. I repeated the question again. He finally admitted...
..."It, uh, uhhh............Attorney Libby."
So he lied. Oh my god, the little fucker LIED to me!!! First he'd said that the SA's Office had "always said" - implying that he'd been in contact with them since the beginning of the case. Then it became "recently". Can't be both, buddy. In fact, when I asked for the copies of the IP logs that he'd said had "finally come", I think I must have scared him because he apparently realized that I was catching on, and he knew he needed an excuse or he'd find himself painted into a corner with no excuse to get him out. So he then called me back and gave me that lame final explanation ("I pulled the wrong case file", and "Libby said") in order to try to "alibi" himself.
Here's something else you probably didn't catch first time 'round, either: Det. Mayo implicated the Gainesville State Attorney's Office in a crime! In specific, he implicated Attorney Lee Libby in an apparent co-conspiracy. I contacted Mr. Libby about all this, later, and Mr. Libby had no recollection of any conversations with Det. Mayo. I suspected that if Mayo said anything at all to Mr. Libby, that the description he'd given was very likely exceptionally watered down and "nutshelled" to the point of sounding like something so completely different from the actual that sounded unimportant. And if Libby said anything then, he'd offered his quick, on-the-spot opinion. But really, that's all it could be taken as...an opinion and not a mandatory course of action. See, it struck me as strange, what Officer Mayo had said. I wasn't aware that you had to first pass a litmus test with the SAO before you even got to make an appearance before a Judge, or to even begin any investigation. That's a new one on me. But this is apparently what Mayo was wanting -- an excuse to end the conversation and make it go away, and it was apparently "convenient", and Mayo took the opportunity to use it against me.
Mayo's got a real problem here. He needs Libby to back him up. But if Libby backs him up, I can sue the State because they apparently prevented me from being able to have my case tried in a criminal court, or to even begin a criminal investigation to gather the evidence needed for such a case. That's not a good accusation. It's a pretty serious one. So the SAO's position will obviously be one of denial to cover their own asses. This will leave Mayo out on his lonesome ass. This leaves Mayo looking like a liar, and like a criminal, as well as acting completely on his own. Mayo would seem to have no friends in this. He screwed himself with that particular choice of excuse. At the very least, Mayo acted exceptionally irresponsibly, even making the City responsible for his negligent actions because he is ultimately their employee.
So...Mayo had made it all up. He feigned taking action, and never really wholeheartedly investigated at all. It makes sense, now, because nothing he'd said to me ever made any real sense.
...What a way to treat a victim, man. How could a cop do something like that to someone? ...Why?
In the end, he treated me like I was a tyrant for wanting to know what was happening with my own case, about what he had been doing with my case, and why he never acted in six months on something so simple as subpoenaeing those IP logs...and he hung up on me.
...In his own words:
"Mr. Sherman, I'm not obligated to tell you anything, I don't have to explain myself, and I'm going to hang up now. Okay, Mr. Sherman? Good-bye."
That was as much "justice" as I was going to get out of this. It was now too late.
So due directly to the officer's malicious and deliberate interference in my case, the expiration period had lapsed, and the logs were no longer obtainable because they had by now been destroyed to the ether by the two companies, who by law are not obligated to keep such logs beyond that amount of time.
The detective had sabotaged any chance for me to try to make people stop, or to set any examples. At the same time, he had now shown my harassers that even the police department was going to help them stalk and harass me, and to protect them from discovery and/or prosecution. This made them feel indestructible and completely untouchable, and they continued to harass me. Mayo had screwed me...on purpose, and I was completely helpless. I DID keep a running log of what was going on. This is interesting reading.8
What do you do when cops go bad? How do you defend against something like that? (sigh)
...Bad cops in the Gainesville Police Department. Oh my god! I can't believe it! But there it is.
And it wasn't to be the last time that I would be affected by stuff like that, either.
In May of 2009, the Alachua County Sheriff's Office would blow off a case of endangerment and assault that I'd filed against a man who had sent his doberman pincer after me when he didn't want to participate in a mandatory government survey that I had been tasked to his house by the federal government to complete with him.[see] In that case, it took ASO two months to respond. Their initial excuse was "Yah, we went there and knocked on the door and he didn't answer." But when they finally closed the case they changed it up and told me that he said that he "wasn't aware that the dog was out". If it were a police officer that the man had done this to, there would be flashing lights all up and down the block, dogs called to the scene, a battering ram used on the door, and people pulling up floor boards to find the guy. But if it's just a federal government employee, I guess that's not as important.
In June of 2009 a Detective Metz at the University Police Department would sabotage another computer crimes-related incident - a server hacking case - against Jeff Capehart.[see] Again, Jeff to the rescue with the explanation that it was again David Donnelly who had interfered and agian told the cop that I was the problem, not the hams. (Unbelievable.)
UPDATE, March 2013: I was being stalked by my daughter-in-law. She'd been harassing me for years, repeatedly trying to coerce me into financially "contributing to the family" -- like a mafioso sort of "tax" for dating her mother. As she saw it, if I was going to be "part of the family", I needed to "contribute" to it so that all the members could benefit (meaning her), not just my wife. Usually I'd just ignore her. She was always trying to find some way to cause problems between her mother and I and cause a breakup. But this time it got bad and she entered the house and started chasing me around the house from room to room as I tried to escape her, getting in my face and yelling and screaming for me to get out of "her" house. (She's not named in the title at all. Never was. It would have been a simple check with Dispatch to confirm, too. Why didn't they do that?) Her 11-year-old daughter was also present, witnessing the whole thing, repeatedly screaming at the top of her lungs for her to "STOP IT!" (She has some pretty serious emotional and psychological stress issues, too. So this was not good for her to have to witness.) When I was finally forced to lock myself in my office and call the police, she quickly gathered the daughter and took her to a birthday party, leaving the scene (and removing a potantial witness with her). When the officers arrived one officer (Officer Crews) spoke with Kathy inside, while I'd been outside with a rookie newbie officer, waiting quietly with him while sitting on our picnic table in the front yard. Then the daughter-in-law returned, less the daughter/witness, and as she walked up the walkway she implied to them that "Yah, we've been having some problems with this guy." I spoke up to that and said "Oh, knock it off, Gina! That's just not true!" The rookie turns to me with a mean look on his face and says "Shut UP, Mr. Sherman! It's NOT looking GOOD for you!" Wait. What? It was shocking to hear him say that considering that he hadn't actually been speaking with anyone yet about the details of the case. Officer Crews was already inside, talking with my wife. He'd spent a total of ten minutes talking with me inside the house, and then 45 minutes out on the front lawn with the daughter-in-law. In yet another shock, without a word, the officers left leaving the daughter-in-law the case report number and related literature instead, and left me inside abandoned without a clue. In the final report, my testimony was nowhere to be found, and the officer had instead placed the daughter-in-law's statement into it, labeled me as "UNEMPLOYED" (I'd told him during his interview with me that I'd worked for the Census Bureau almost 10 years at the time), and I couldn't help but notice that he'd taken the time to make it sound like I was the problem...even though the CAD display showed that I was the complainant - the person who had called 911. There was no mention about her chasing me around. Nothing about yelling at me to get out of "her" house. No mention of the screaming minor child. C&FS was not notified. No one checked to even see if the daughter was even listed in the County records as being a part owner of the house. The officer blindly assumed that because a woman was involved, that the man was the bad guy. The CAD display even shows me as the caller/complainant, not her. Statistics say that 95-perecnt of the time, the male is the aggressor. But when it actually is the 5% that's going on... Well...I had to request a copy of my own case report before I could find out what the officer had done to me. Why did Officer Crews do that to me?
UPDATE, Two weeks later: The daughter-in-law's ex husband ambushed me at my wife's office while we were having lunch. Slamming the door to his truck with two of his minor children in it to witness, he yelled "You ane ME! We're gonna have WORDS!" Then he stalked behind me into the office, cursing and threatening me along the way. And when we got into the office, he pushed me up against the office wall with my wife watching. His two minor children were meanwhile left abandoned alone in his truck. I was again forced to call the police. Two patrol vehicles responded, with four officers. The same detective from two weeks ago was there yet again, Officer Crews. Again, the perpetrator's statement was placed into my own complaint, and my statement didn't make it in ot the report at all. And yet again, I didn't find this out until after I had obtained a copy of the report, days later. There was no mention of the presence of two minor children to a scene of verbal threats and physical violence. No mention of two of the officers having to watch the kids in another hallway while the other two interrogated everyone. Again, no notification to Children & Family Services of the situation. The officer yet again made it sound as if the case was a non-issue, and as if it may have been my fault.
...AGAIN, man?!!! Are you KIDDING?!!! Why are these guys doing this to me??? This is now the third time that GPD has fudged a case that I've filed!
UPDATE: 2018.
...So now, GPD has fudged a case for the fourth time.
This is obviously going to keep happening to me.
The police apparently have set it in their minds to make sure that I have an "understanding" of this "message" that they're not going to help me in any way, and that every time I try to utilize them, this is what's going to happen.
So I guess that's it, then. I guess the rights to police protection under constitutional law apparently don't apply to me. I guess the taxes I pay for this protection don't matter either, apparently being just a free payment to the City and to the County for something that I'm not allowed to receive.
So what do I have to do then to get the cops in this town to do the right thing? I mean, am I supposed to take this situation to the Press or something? Do I have to make it national news or something?...take it to ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, HLN, Dateline, 60 Minutes, 20/20, and What Would You Do? before someone takes notice and takes it seriously enough to actuall do something? How is it that so many cases can be handled so badly and no one sees anything wrong there? Why are cops doing this to me?
(*sigh!*) Where's Erin Brockovitch when you need her? Right? Oh wait. Heh. That's right. Did that. Already filled out her form mail...three times so far over the years. I think her web tech guy is deliberately deleting the emails before they even reach her because he probably just can't believe what he's reading. But yes. I have even tried contacting Erin Brockovitch. Didn't even receive an acknowledgement email...which is why I think they're probably being "filtered".
I guess you can call it 'ESPN Intuition'...when people just pull stuff right out of their ass, backed up with no forensics science, no facts, no evidence...just...very incorrect "gut feeling"...which, they're "sure" of. Unbelievably, it seems to be the police departments which adhere to this method of thinking more than anybody else. The prevailing attitude seems to be, "Well, if so many people, agencies, and organizations are that upset with this guy, then he must have done something wrong, and he deserves whatever he gets."
Negligence and irresponsibility in the law seems to be a common occurance. But unfortunately, in my case, the improper handling of these incidents was not accidental. It was obvious that what was being done was being done on purpose. The officers may have thought that what they were doing the right thing...to help...in some twisted, contorted manner of thinking. But they were making incorrect assumptions, and helping the wrong people. Whether they like the description or not, the officers' actions were those of endangerment through deliberate actions (repeated over multiple different cases) to alter or to even completely my testimony, alter a case report, and make it "just go away". And if it happened because another officer (Mayo) had previously convinced them that I was a problem, and this was all being done as a sort of "favor" for Mayo, then now you've crossed the line into the game of malicious, repeated, stalking behavior. Whether they agree with that assessment or not is not in my care. It is actually what they are indeed doing, whether they like it or not.
All of the Final Reports filed in the later incidents were handled in nearly identical M.O. to that of the Final Report of Detective Mayo9. They are so similar in fact, that it is becoming obvious to even the amateur that these officers are in fact using Mayo's as a "template" for their own. That report made no mention of phone discussions, exchanges of emails, the interviews with Emergency Management...just one phone contact with me. The final report made no mention of the fact that I had requested he subpoena the IP logs, or that he'd repeatedly told me that he had them, or any mention of his "mistakes". Where is it? Where did it all go? What happened to all of that interaction? His final report, in fact, was condescending, and was deliberately worded to make me sound like I was an idiot. There is no excuse for a report like that, after six months of supposed "investigation". It's a sloppy report done last minute - like a college student who'd waited until a couple hours before his final was due. It's half copied from the previous officer's inadequate report of the situation. But in the end, Detective Mayo's final report only makes damn sure that no future officer who reads that report ever takes me seriously....ever. His words were uncalled for, and his irresponsible handling of my case only caused me more problems and helped aid the wrong people.
While thinking he was helping the good guys, Detective Mayo directly, with aforethought and malicious intent, aided and abetted and collaborated with the bad guys in the commission of a computer crime, sharing intimite case details with the perpetrators and with people outside of the circle of "need to know", tampering with a victim, tampering with evidence, and through his callous indifference and deliberate inaction allowing for the destruction of evidence, and in committing computer-related harassment and stalking crimes against someone he was supposed to be sworn to protect. By stalling subpoenaing of the logs, and making sure that the evidence was erased and I couldn't do anything then about it first, and in working with the Royce's to do this, it became a conspiracy. In so doing that, he became a co-conspirator. He deliberately and with aforethought prevented evidence from being obtained. He interfered with it's collection. He also apparently must have given the State Attorney's Office false and/or misleading information which caused the attorney assigned to the case to label it as a "civil" case instead of a "computer crimes" case, which is what it actually was. What did Detective Mayo leave out of his report to Attorney Libby to bring him to that wildly incorrect conclusion? Acting like the Worlds Dumbest Criminal though, now Detective Mayo had actually implicated Libby! I don't think Mr. Libby would appreciate that!
These actions protected Phil and Melissa Royce. These actions caused the erasure of evidence. These actions...gave my stalkers carte blanche to continue harassing and stalking me. In working with the Royce's, a police officer in the Gainesville Police Department had now become the harasser and stalker, and was now co-responsible for the comission of the computer crime. Pretty hefty stuff for him to have to deal with, huh? He thought he was helping the good guys, and got duped into abusing the system and the law to aid and abet the bad guys instead. I'm sorry, but Mayo has only himself to blame, there. I went to him for help. He screwed me by his own choice; by his own actions. He alone is responsible for that. I didn't exactly hold a gun to his head. Same for Libby.
I'm resigned to the fact that I'm probably not ever going to get my name back, or to see Alachua County SKYWARN's reputation and credibility fully restored again. The cop knows people in Emergency Management, and they know people in the City and the County...the Board of County Commissioners, etc. And all they have to do is have one person do a favor for another, and do a favor for someone else, and documents or evidence can be made to disappear, or to be thrown out, or ignored entirely. It's in fact how I got where I'm at in the first place. One person in the NWS did a favor for the hams, who found someone in Emergency Management to do a favor for them, who had the cop do a favor for them, etc. (sigh) Sadder thing is...in everybody doing these favors, these people became committed to crimes, to bad things, to bad people, and now they're all in positions where they could lose their careers at any moment. If just one person speaks too much, gets drunk, brags more than they should have...then all the other dominoes can start to fall. And I'm patient...and I'm waiting...and I'm persistent. I'm not letting this go; I'm not giving this up. [Stares at his watch, leans back in his chair, yawns, tilts his cowboy hat forward over his eyes and begins to rock.] I'm used to having to wait. I'm good at waiting.
Jeff Capehart was my lead stalker. He was the one who encouraged everyone else and gave them ideas. Jeff also described personal details about my case to me that he should not have known not being a party to the particular case himself at ALL. Jeff was just a civilian, not part of the "need to know" circle. Apparently the detective was letting them all know, at EVERY step, what new was happening with the case, so that they could prepare, or make up a cover, or whatever. For example, I'd mentioned to the detective not to give them any hint about wireless devices, in case they didn't have one. This way, they couldn't say that someone stopped by outside their home and tried to send the message from their system to try to make it LOOK like it was them. Not even a week later; NOT EVEN A WEEK LATER, Melissa was actually USING that very excuse. Son of a BITCH! And before the case was closed, Jeff approached me with questions about my own case: "Did you say (this) about Dave Donnelly? Did you say (this) about Chief May? Did you send the detective a stack of emails 'this thick'? Did the emails say this? and that? What did you think this would accomplish? Did you think it was going to GO anywhere? Do you think the detective takes you seriously? What would you do if I told you that the detective thinks you're stupid? that he thinks you 'don't know what you're talking about'. He thinks you're 'just using the law to harass innocent people'. I'm told that he's been saying whatever he thought you wanted to hear so as to delay actual handling of the case until the expiration time ran out." (sigh) What the hell was this uninvolved guy doing with all of this intimite information about the case??? How did he know??? Phil and Melissa had told him. ...And the cop, of course...had told that to Phil and Melissa. The detective acted completely inappropriately and acting on improperly on an incorrect personal gut feeling and which had no business in the case and which in the end caused me more problems and great pain. He inexplicably cooperated with and shared information with the other party.
I want everyone to be perfectly clear on this:
...Jeff Capehart contacts two other stalkers and they give him personal information about my case. The other two stalkers had obtained this information FROM THE COP ASSIGNED TO MY CASE, in violation of policy and protocol and the law. And so, Jeff BECOMES WITNESS TO THIS INAPPROPRIATE ASSOCIATION going on between the cop and the bad guys. As of the date of this writing, Jeff STILL has not approached GPD with this information, insisting that since it went from 1) the cop, to 2) the other stalkers, to 3) to him, that it is thus "third hand information" and "not admissible". I have repeatedly advised him that this is not the case, the he is DIRECT witness to Phil and Melissa admitting that a cop told them that he'd sabotaged a case - that the cop admitted this to the very people that the case was against! ...And Jeff is refusing to go to the authorities with the information, making himself an actual accomplice to it! He knows all about it! And yet he refuses anyway to go to the authorities! (No moral compulsion. It's completely missing in him. It's common with this guy to "logic" his way out of responsibility like this, and to continue to allow harm to come to me. He in fact has repeated this very thing over the years with me. ...Causes me problems, logics himself out of responsibility, blames me for bringing it upon myself, never comes to my rescue or does anything to make it stop.) To make himself feel better, he even went to a few local FDLE seminars about stalking and harassment that was put on by some local cops (in fact, he's repeated this tactic twice that I remember), and only gave them half of the information, left very important facts and details out, genericised it, and asked them if I had a case. The cops, knowing only so little and not understanding that they were being duped, would tell him "no". Then he'd bring this back to me saying "Yah, well the cops think something completely different and they think you don't have a case." Here's one of the emails he sent me as recently as March of 2009, after he'd broken into the AC-EMWIN computer, and after I'd demanded he do the right thing and finally contact GPD:
"Hey, I contacted an agent with FDLE in the Gainesville Field Office and presented him with the situation. He basically said you would have to file the complaint yourself with the local PD because the agencies don't pay attention to 3rd party complaints. The complaints have to come from the affected person. He also said the best you could hope for would be an administrative reprimand on his personnel file, but that it is likely not worth pursuing."
What he was doing was going to other completely uninvolved police agencies trying to get them to say things which would exclude him from having to do the right thing; and he did that by leaving all of the most important stuff out when describing the situation to them, and then waiting for the answer that he knew they would then give him back. Then he'd use it to try to convince me that I had absolutely nothing to go on. But he was very careful to never go to the involved agency and tell them what happened and see what they had to say. This isn't a man of conscience who wants to do the right thing. It's a man who knows he was involved in an unethical way and who doesn't want to call attention to that fact that he had obtained information he had no business obtaining, and no business knowing nor reason to know. ...Period.
And so, to this day, Detective Mayo has not yet been brought to justice, because Jeff Capehart will not approach GPD about it and tell them what he knows. Jeff keeps applying his own personal version of criminal law to the situation and since it's being handled internally (that's read "swept under the rug") and he thinks there's no criminal consequences for him to compel him to answer, he sees no reason to help. This is psychopath thinking. He's just making excuses.
It's actually in his best interest not to come forward. You see, to bring this to GPD's attention means that the detective would get in trouble. The detective might spew...everything. His connection to Phil and Melissa, and to Jeff, would become obvious. In investigating further, they'd ask Jeff why he never brought it to their attention before, why he took SO LONG to come to them with it; and then Jeff would end up in trouble. Once the cop went down, he might spew about his other government connections (Dave Donnelly) and what those people told him, and then they'd go down. And the cycle might repeat until we got all the way to NWS-JAX. The entire thing might crumble and fall apart if only Jeff would just go report this to the authorities. But he's keeping his mouth shut 1) because he doesn't want to get into trouble, and 2) he doesn't want to have his involvement pointed out. After all, he's been hard at work building up his image to the world that he's very important and a can't-do-without kind of guy. And 3) because it's just too much fun torturing me and he gets off on it and he loves being able to be in control of me and my life. It's a thrill for him.
In all of my dealings with Jeff, I have always noted how remorseless Jeff has been towards me. He sees himself as doing nothing wrong. He has repeatedly told me that he does the things that he does to me to help me. He truly believes that he's doing favors for me. It's sick. I listen to him speak and all I want to do is wretch.
I have repeatedly told him to stop, to leave me alone, to stop working others up against me, that he is not to talk about me or Alachua County SKYWARN to anyone anymore...ever, that he's not to track where I go on the web, that he's not to pester my friends, family members, or associations. And he has repeatedly refused. One day he even said "NO!" in an email. He is relentless and will not stop even when asked. He is obsessive-compulsively fixated on me and in causing problems in my life and every time I try to catch him or go to the authorities people either ignore me or sabotage me. I cannot make him stop. I believe it is because the authorities have shown him that they do not care and that they do not intend to do anything about it and so, Jeff likely feels, he is being allowed to harass me...as if a law out there says that he can. And this is what the police have done to me by sabotaging my case, and especially by treating me like I was stupid.
