Brazoria County Cop Blues
A rash of firings and mysterious resignations shows that down this way, life at the top of a small-town police force tends to be nasty, brutish, and short.
Mainly in an effort to get Internet access to the Brazosport Facts — the local newspaper of record for pretty much that part of Brazoria County that is neither Alvin nor Pearland — I subscribed to home delivery.
For one reason or another, I still don’t have Internet access*, but very early in the morning, five or six days a week, a surly man drives all the way down my lane from the nearest FM road, pulls in my driveway to turn around, chunks a plastic-wrapped copy of the Facts outside his window towards the yard next door, and drives back off up the gravel road in a cloud of pre-dawn dust.
End result is that my Facts are about as far away from my door as possible while remaining on my property… So: very much not like the good old days, back when an eager beaver of a kid on a bike would hurl the paper atop or as near my front step as possible.
Anyway, unless you take a granular view of local high school sports, or use The Facts as your sole source of national and world news, it’s a pretty quick read, most days. Generally I spend the most time on the obits, as mentioned on here before, but over time, a trend is developing that I am following with more and more interest: to wit, the lawmen of Brazoria County and their singular knack for going down in flames.
Which is…kind of a headscratcher, in that I had been assured before I moved down here, and have been continually reminded by people since, that Brazoria County is now and forever has been a toweringly corrupt warren of interlocking fiefdoms presided over by (assumedly long-serving) petty tyrants with badges and guns, but why then are so many being toppled with such dispatch? I mean, aren’t these Boss Hoggs supposed to rule for life?
A short and possibly incomplete run-down:
On March 30 it was announced that Angleton police chief Aaron Ausmus, then on the job for less than three years, had tendered his resignation, effective immediately. No explanation was forthcoming at the time, either from Ausmus nor city officials. The Facts has a FOIA request in; I have a bag of microwave popcorn ready. It was reported that city council was on the precipice of taking up some matter concerning the behavior of Ausmus and the female city manager. She denied being the target of any ire from the council, and Ausmus’s career seppuku prevented the item from being discussed, so make of all that what you will.
March 30 was the same day the resignation of Oyster Creek police chief Ruben Gonzalez went into effect. On the first of the month, Gonzalez announced he was stepping down to attend to unspecified “urgent matters at home requiring constant care.”
Okay then. Two years ago, his predecessor Tim Bradberry resigned after he was convicted for lying to police about the circumstances leading to a June 2019 hit-and-run incident in the parking lot of a Lake Jackson apartment complex.
Details provided by the Facts were murky, but Bradberry, who was in uniform but off duty at the time, claimed that he was there because he had given a drunk woman a ride home from a nearby restaurant, whereas she said she had driven home herself. Video from the restaurant’s security cameras corroborated her story, thereby leading to Bradberry’s conviction, but why Bradberry was lying about what had transpired between the two of them remains a mystery.
A little backstory with added speculation: Reported as a suspicious person, Bradberry, backing out in haste to evade responding LJ cops, had collided with a boat trailer, causing very minor damage. After a few minutes away, Bradberry returned to the scene to put his name to what he’d done. My theory is that the mystery woman was also in the truck at the time of this incident, and perhaps for reasons I will leave to your dirty little minds, was not visible to the tow truck driver; however, Bradberry was alone when he returned to the scene.)
Moral of this story: All in all, if you are a cop and you are going to carry on in any way, shape or form, it’s best to A) not get caught by DPS, who in many cases I’ve observed, don’t give a shit about cutting lesser cops any slack; and B) confine your shenanigans to your own jurisdiction.
Bradberry failed to heed “B,” as did our next subject, and in quite the grand manner….
That would be Sweeny police chief John Barnard, who was forced into retirement last month following a fairly spectacular DWI arrest in Friendswood. (Which is not just another town, but also in a different county.)
Cops there pulled Barnard over for speeding (58 in a 45), weaving, and due to the smell of marijuana emanating from the cab of his black 2013 F-150 — evidently, a Cheech n’ Chong-worthy cloud a cop claimed to have been able to detect even at that speed.
Found inside Barnard’s truck: “bits of marijuana, commonly known as ‘shake’” scattered about the console and floor mats and “a white canister filled with a usable amount of what appeared to be marijuana” conveniently labeled as “a sativa hybrid called Super Lemon Haze.”
Also discovered: a pill bottle containing a smorgasbord of mixed pharmaceuticals, to wit: “(T)wo tablets of metformin, an anti-diabetes medication; one tablet of zolpidem, a sedative commonly used to treat insomnia; one tablet of the blood pressure medicine metoprolol; and one tablet of omeprazole, known by its brand name of Prilosec.”
In other words, a potpourri of no-fun-at-all old man pills of the sort advertised in commercial breaks for The Masters, and about as far a cry as you can get from the hellzapoppin’ inventory Hunter Thompson rattled off in the opening pages of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Seems like Barnard’s pot dealer is way better than his pill guy.
Also in the truck “were several firearms, including a loaded Glock 17 handgun and an AR-15 rifle with a noise suppressor and an unloaded magazine.” Now those might have piqued Thompson’s interest.
Barnard admitted to arresting officers he’d had “six or seven beers” that evening at a friend’s house. Given that DWI drivers tend to severely under-report, that admission to such a heroic intake should leave as little surprise the fact that Barnard failed field sobriety tests and refused a blood draw.
Lastly, during booking, jailers found “a metal pipe in his pocket with what the officer described as a usable amount of burnt marijuana,” which constitutes a felony: whether intentional or not, having any drugs of any kind on your person as you are being booked into jail — even just a half-burnt nug of Lemon Haze sativa hybrid — is serious business.
Cops being cops, they let that one slide. Barnard was only charged with DWI and a weapons rap. (Apparently, even if you are a cop, you aren’t allowed to roll around drunk and stoned in a truck full of guns. And here I thought this was America.)
Meanwhile, over in Danbury, lord, what a shitshow.
Earlier this year, incoming police chief Robert Mancillas was fired before his first day on the job.
Mancillas, a Lake Jackson native and former top cop in the strange little town of Holiday Lakes, was hired before his background check was complete, and apparently, something was not Danbury-worthy in what the 57-year-old Mancillas had gotten himself into during his stints as top cop in Holiday Lakes, patrolman in Wharton, Richmond, and Ganado; deputy sheriff in Wharton County; and a lieutenant of guards in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Clemens Unit.
For the time being that skeleton remains in the Mancillas closet, as neither he nor Danbury officials are talking. (Again, the Facts has sent in a FOIA request.) However, it seems unlikely Holiday Lakes will be hiring Mancillas back — on his way out the door, he freely told the Facts those cheapskates only paid him “$15 an hour with no benefits.”
The non-existent Danbury tenure of Mancillas followed one of a mere two months by Rick White, who allegedly fell upward into a non-specified better gig. But dig this: White’s short stay followed that of Mark Pritchard, whose time in the job was also two months. And unlike White, Pritchard claimed he was not seeking greener pastures. What’s more, he shared his grave if vague misgivings with the Facts on his way out the door:
“I’ll say this: There are things in the political realm in this town that are a little too unstable for me, and I don’t feel that there is a safe future in this position,” he said.
So if you are trying to keep score, the twin two-month stints of White and Pritchard leading up to the Mancillas debacle followed a three-week interim phase under a fourth cop, who per more Facts coverage, seems to have been led to believe that he was under consideration for a permanent gig. The temp replaced Derek Dyson, who managed to survive five years at the top.
“Qualified police chiefs don’t uproot their lives a second time just a couple of months after eagerly accepting a job. There has to be something institutionally amiss about the job,” said Michael Morris in one Facts editorial. In another, he seconded Pritchard’s accusation of “instability” in town leadership, and went on to ascribe that to its “reputation for whispering campaigns about each other, being overly involved in day-to-day operations or experiencing turnover themselves.”
Danbury’s leaders are now considering a most cunning plan: Instead of hiring a sixth police chief since the end of 2019, they are exploring the devilishly clever option of simply “having someone lead the department who has a title other than police chief.”
Aha! That’s certainly one way to ensure no more police chiefs will leave within weeks of hiring: if you call ‘em something like Copmaster, Boss of All Fuzz, Head Copper In Charge, or Lord High Sheriff of Danbury, and they bail with the quickness anyway, it won’t technically be part of a trend or anything.
*PS: During the course of writing this article, I was able to finally obtain the Internet access to the online archives of the Brazosport Facts that has rightfully been mine for months now.
Dude... the impossible curlicues of Danbury intrigue. Not sure if they’re still operating, and even if, prolly not during the plague, but if things open up I recommend an evening at Vrazel’s Ballroom in Danbury. Bonus: I threw the Facts, Houston Chronicle, and Houston Post from my bike.
I think this kind of thing goes on in most places most of the time. It's hard to get good help for the going rates.