OWASSO - The former city manager ordered the purging of police videos showing a DUI stop of the vice mayor because he wanted to save the councilor the "embarrassment" of the images reaching the public, a top municipal official said.
Assistant City Manager Sherry Bishop said she regularly met two to three times a week with former City Manager Rodney Ray, who accepted a resignation agreement June 25, about a month after the City Council ordered an independent investigation into his office.
In April, Ray ordered the deletion of two police videos showing the traffic stop of Vice Mayor Chris Kelley in February, a municipal memo shows. Through a state Open Records Act request, the Tulsa World in mid-June obtained and posted a copy of the videos that had been secured by a police supervisor.
Ray has declined requests for an interview.
"He felt like that it was going to be published. It would be on YouTube," Bishop said in a telephone interview. "His anticipation was that eventually somebody is going to know. Somebody is going to ask for it, and it will be on the Internet. And it would just be an embarrassment to Dr. Kelley."
Told initially by Owasso police that he was being arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol, Kelley, a veterinarian, ultimately was driven home by police and was not arrested, police said.
In a memo to Information Technology Director Teresa Willson dated April 25, Ray cited police policy relating to video and directed Willson to "purge the (Kelley) files listed below from our video files. There exist no case and no case reports relating to these files, thus they are unnecessary to maintain."
The Owasso Police Department's Policy & Procedure Manual states that nonevidentiary video and audio recordings are to be maintained for a minimum of 30 days after their creation. But because of data-storage limitations, access to the recordings can't be guaranteed after 30 days, the policy states.
"Malicious destruction or deletion" of video is prohibited by the policy.
Bishop said she doesn't remember exactly when Ray discussed the video, but she does recall conversations about it among Ray, then- Assistant City Manager Warren Lehr, Willson and herself.
"It was more along the lines of, 'How would this look to people?'" said Bishop, adding that she is unaware of a case in which any other videos have been ordered deleted. "It would look worse than it was. None of us had seen the video."
Bishop still hasn't viewed the footage. Lehr said he saw the videos for the first time when the World posted them.
Bishop said she later told Ray, "If there's no video, Dr. Kelley can't say, 'See, I wasn't drunk.' Then he doesn't have any way to prove what actually happened. People will say, 'He was falling-down, dead-drunk. It was so bad.' And he didn't have any way to disprove it."
Lehr was appointed interim city manager when Ray left.
"There was some discussion about the video and what to do with it," Lehr said. "Mr. Ray, as he commonly did, went to staff, and he talked on a regular basis about what should we do in this situation.
"When you had a decision to make, he usually conferred with staff. Sometimes, he heeded the advice of staff. He always considered it. Sometimes he did his own thing."
As for the videos being part of the public domain, Bishop added, "Among staff, we never thought of it in terms that it was evidence of any kind," and it wasn't considered a public record at the time "because I think we work in a situation where I consider everything in my office a public record, and every day I decide to throw some of it away.
"If you ask for it, then it's an open record. But otherwise, it's just junk on my desk until you ask for it."
Bishop and Lehr, both of whom were interviewed in the council's investigation of Ray, say questioning focused primarily on a vehicle donation and Ray's ordered deletion of the Kelley videos.
Lehr said he has confirmed the subject matter with three to four other staffers with whom he has spoken.
"We felt pretty confident what this investigation was about," Lehr said last week in an interview at the Tulsa World. "Had it been about bribery or racketeering or embezzlement or harassment or all these other things that citizens are now speculating, ... I felt pretty certain that somebody would have asked us."
Citing a personnel records exemption in the state Open Records Act, the city and its council have withheld release of the investigative report, which was produced by a Tulsa law firm that billed the city more than $22,600.
Only Ray and the Brewster & DeAngelis law office maintain copies of the report, Owasso City Attorney Julie Lombardi said.
She said it's the municipality's long-standing practice not to release investigative reports regarding personnel.
The Tulsa World has sought a copy of the report through the Open Records Act. The request was denied by the city, which cited a section of the act that says a public body may keep personnel records confidential that "relate to internal personnel investigations, including examination and selection material for employment, hiring, promotion, demotion, discipline or resignation."
Personnel records not specifically falling within that subsection include "any final disciplinary action resulting in the loss of pay, suspension, demotion of position or termination," the act states. Ray was suspended with pay May 24, the same day the City Council ordered a probe into his office on an undisclosed ethics complaint.
The resignation agreement makes no mention of the investigative report being subject to nondisclosure. It does, however, state that the city will refrain from making any negative or disparaging comments or statements, written or oral, about Ray.
His severance package included $125,000 in accrued deferred compensation, the final $25,000 of which is due to him on Dec. 31.
"Having not seen the report, and I'm just conjecturing now, but I would have to believe if there were something that would have been cause for termination, then that payment of contract terms would have been totally different," Lehr said.
Another allegation investigators asked Bishop and Lehr about was the donation of a police car to the city by a reserve officer and whether that donation was properly accounted for and approved by the council, they said.
Owasso Mayor Doug Bonebrake has said the probe's expense was a "necessary use of taxpayers' money."
Lombardi said a resignation pact was the way to go.
"I can tell you that my advice will never be to terminate when there is another option," the attorney said in an interview last week at the Tulsa World. "It simply is too expensive. ... In this case, I have absolutely no doubt that a termination would have resulted in years and years of litigation."
Rhett Morgan 918-581-8395
rhett.morgan@tulsaworld.com
Original Print Headline: Official speaks on video erasure
