For the record, Tommy didn’t interview me and I never said I hate Parnell, I have never met Parnell, I said he was a crook. I said he hurt people and he does………B
Published: Aug. 12, 2024 at 4:50 PM CDT|Updated: 22 minutes ago
WACO, Texas (KWTX) – A McLennan County grand jury is being asked to investigate reports that McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara improperly ordered one of his deputies to work at McNamara’s farm while the deputy’s supervisors and co-workers wondered why he was missing his assigned duty shifts.
Johnathan Crawley, the former deputy, was injured while clearing land with a chainsaw at McNamara’s farm. He is speaking publicly for the first time about working at the Bosqueville farm. So are two of his supervisors and one of his co-workers, with one telling KWTX he warned the sheriff that the deputy working on his personal property while being paid by the county was wrong.
McNamara said the accusations from Crawley and others are “totally false” and that Crawley is a “known liar” who resigned after he was stopped for suspicion of drunken driving and lied about it.
He said his statements and those from the three former employees are the product of “disgruntled ex-employees who would do anything to make me look bad.”
The request for the grand jury investigation came from Bernadette Feazell, a blogger who has professed a bitter hatred toward McNamara. Feazell, ex-wife of former McLennan County District Attorney Vic Feazell, sent packets of information with allegations against the sheriff to McLennan County officials, Texas Rangers, the FBI and to the foreperson of the current McLennan County grand jury.
Following the county’s grand jury plan, District Clerk Jon Gimble presented the packet of information to the foreperson Aug. 1 at a regular grand jury session and asked grand jurors to let officials know if they think an investigation is warranted at the grand jury’s next meeting on Aug. 15.
McLennan County District Attorney Josh Tetens said if the grand jury asks for the allegations to be investigated, he will refer the probe to the Texas Rangers or the Texas Attorney General’s office to investigate before recusing his office.
Tetens and McNamara campaigned together, and each endorsed the other in Teten’s campaign against Barry Johnson and McNamara’s race for a fourth term this year against Jeff Aguirre, an investigator in Teten’s office.
Tetens said his office does not initiate criminal investigations.
The allegations center around reports that McNamara, 78, ordered Crawley to work at McNamara’s farm in Bosqueville while Crawley was supposed to be working for the department’s Mental Health Unit.
Crawley, 33, and three former sheriff’s office employees confirmed the sheriff ordered him to work on his farm. Crawley said the work started about three years ago with him mowing around a gun range on McNamara’s property and evolved to clearing land where McNamara is building a new home, mending fences and prepping the 140-year-old McNamara homestead for demolition.
“I was doing what I was told, and I needed a job,” Crawley said. “He was my boss, and at the time, he was giving me an order to do something and I felt like I needed to do it. I wasn’t sure at first that it was wrong.”
Crawley said McNamara never paid him for his work and he turned in his regular county timecards that reflected full-time work as a deputy.
McNamara said Crawley left the sheriff’s office after he was stopped on drunken driving allegations. He said Crawley became belligerent with the officer and lied to his supervisors about the incident.
Crawley admits he said things that night that he shouldn’t have but denies he was drunk. He said the officer did not arrest him and allowed his wife to come pick him up. He said he resigned out of concern he embarrassed himself and the sheriff’s office.
Crawley said his work schedule at McNamara’s farm was sporadic over about three years, with the sheriff ordering him to work there one or two days before he returned to his normal duties to working there two weeks or more at a time.
“(McNamara) said to tell my immediate supervisor that I was going out to work at the range,” Crawley said.
The McNamaras have had a gun range on their farm for decades and frequently host events where friends and family members shoot fully automatic weapons and blow up old cars.
Sheriff’s Office deputies and other agencies also use it for training, although the city of Waco has a first-class gun range at the law enforcement training center near the airport for county law enforcement agencies and despite the fact that McNamara has no contract or memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the county for employees to train at his farm.
McNamara said the sheriff’s office and the county are working up a MOU, which is similar to a contract, to cover the multi-agency use of the gun range, including potential liability issues, on McNamara’s private property.
However, McNamara was at a loss for words when asked why now, after 50 years of officers using the gun range on his farm, that he felt the need to formalize that agreement. After a prolonged pause, he said it had nothing to do with the allegations that have surfaced from Crawley.
McLennan County Administrator Dustin Chapman said Friday he knows of no proposed memorandum of understanding covering the gun range on McNamara’s property currently in the works. He deferred additional questions to Mike Dixon, the Waco attorney who represents McLennan County.
Dixon declined comment when asked about the gun range issues, Crawley’s work there or what McNamara described as the pending agreement between him and the county.
However, David Kilcrease, former sheriff’s office chief deputy, said he told McNamara about three or four years ago that if multiple agencies are going to continue to use his range and if county deputies are doing their Texas Commission on Law Enforcement firearm certifications out there, there should be a MOU in place for a variety of issues, especially concerns over liability issues and county employees working on private property.
“I took that memorandum of understanding question to Mike Dixon several years ago and Mike Dixon said, ‘Absolutely not. That’s a bad idea,’” Kilcrease said. “That concept was shot down a few years back. Also, Parnell has used that range for 50 years or more. If the county enters into a MOU with Parnell, then the county is probably going to be on the hook for the cleanup for all the decades of lead deposits that are out there. But I don’t know if that had anything to do with it.”
In response, McNamara said he was unaware what Dixon told Kilcrease about the MOU, but added Chief Deputy Cody Blossman and Major David Ives currently are working on a proposed MOU to present to the county, which the sheriff said should be done “in a couple of days.”
“We are going to run it by Dixon and the county judge, and if they think it is good, great, and if they don’t, we’ll continue on just like we’ve been doing all along,” McNamara said.
McNamara said he has made his gun range available to multiple law enforcement agencies, including local, state, federal and even the Delta Force, a specialized Army unit. He said he has maintained the range for many years at his own expense but said the constant use has caused wear-and-tear on a bridge that he recently had to replace and on roads leading to the range.
McNamara said agencies continue to use his gun range because it often is hard to book appointments at the city of Waco’s gun range. He said Waco ISD police trained at his farm last week.
He said “90 percent” of Crawley’s work on his property involved maintaining the range, adding that he paid Crawley in cash for any personal work he did there not related to range maintenance.
Crawley disputes that contention, saying he was paid by the county for all the time during the three-year period he spent working on McNamara’s personal property away from the shooting range. McNamara never paid him, he said.
Crawley said he suffered a serious eye injury on June 15, 2022, while using a chain saw to clear trees on what turned out to be the site of the McNamaras’ new home. A large splinter or thorn flew into his eye, causing significant scratches that required Crawley to be treated by an eye specialist.
Crawley’s pay records obtained by KWTX show he was paid by the county for regular working hours as a deputy on the day he was injured. His medical records also show what day he was injured and note that his injury was caused when he was cutting a tree with a chainsaw.
McNamara took photos of Crawley mowing around the gun range, which Crawley suspects the sheriff staged to provide an explanation if questions arose about what Crawley was doing at the farm during what was supposed to be his regular county work hours.
Crawley said he also was asked to help strip the historic McNamara family home to ready it for demolition and answered late-night calls to come fix fences when the McNamara’s horses got out.
News of Crawley’s routine absence from his regular work shift filtered up the chain-of-command and eventually became common knowledge throughout the department, said Kilcrease, the former chief deputy who retired in 2023.
“I knew it was going on and I confronted Parnell about it,” Kilcrease said. “I told Parnell, ‘This needs to stop.’”
Kilcrease said he first learned about McNamara’s use of Crawley at his farm from former Capt. Chris Eubank, Crawley’s uncle, who fielded complaints from former Lt. Kevin Ferguson and former Sgt. Brad Bond about Crawley’s mysterious disappearances from his regular duty shifts.
McNamara told Kilcrease Crawley was working to clean up around the gun range and that he was taking vacation days to work out there. He also told Kilcrease he had pictures of Crawley working at the range.
“I left that conversation with the understanding that it was going to stop,” Kilcrease said. “I think it did for a while, but then it started right back up again. Parnell just told me Crawley was on vacation so I wouldn’t know what he was doing.”
Ferguson, 44, who resigned from the sheriff’s office in June 2022 after 21 years, said he learned about Crawley from Bond, Crawley’s immediate supervisor.
“Brad was venting to me about not being able to utilize John in the Mental Health Unit because he was being pulled off his normal duties to go work for Parnell,” Ferguson said. “It was pretty common knowledge around the SO and most everyone thought it wasn’t right.”
Ferguson said deputies routinely use the gun range on McNamara’s farm for training purposes but added they also clean up the area and pick up after themselves before leaving.
Bond did not return phone messages from KWTX seeking comment for this story.
Amanda Leka worked on the sheriff’s office Mental Health Unit from July 2019 to December 2022, when she resigned out of frustration with what she called “the good ol’ boy system that was in full effect.”
Leka said it was common knowledge that Crawley spent most of his time working at McNamara’s farm while he was supposed to be going with his unit on mental health calls or transporting patients to mental health hospitals across the state.
She said his routine absence angered her because it left her unit short-handed. She said she reported it all the way up the chain-of-command but nothing changed.
“Everybody knew. Our entire unit knew. Basically, I was told the sheriff is the boss and what he wants is what we do because we work for the sheriff,” Leka said. “And I just said, ‘OK, I’ll just do my little patrol and I won’t say another word.’ But I was mad because we were short-handed running call-to-call and going on all these mental health cases and patient transports, and he was basically not pulling his weight. When you are short-handed, it puts all the weight on you.”
Leka said supervisors told her Crawley was on “special assignment for the sheriff” or “building a fence for the sheriff.” She said he worked more on McNamara’s farm than he spent on his regular deputy duties.
“I have never known somebody needing so much fence built,“ she said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time he was at the sheriff’s place. We actually had a meeting once because we were kidding him after we all saw his time sheet. We were just joking with him because we knew where he was.”
Precinct 4 County Commissioner Ben Perry said he has heard the allegations about Crawley working at McNamara’s farm, adding he “truly hopes that they aren’t true.”
However, he said if the grand jury thinks an investigation is warranted, one should be done.
Someone needs to verify that the good Sheriff has the appropriate approvals from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (ATF) to possess fully automatic weapons (machineguns) and use explosives “to blow up old cars”. Without having gone through the application process & obtained a $200 “tax stamp” for each machinegun in his possession and an even more rigorous process to approved to use explosives, the good sheriff is in some “deep do-do” if he lacks either, to the tune of $250,000 & 10 years in federal prison FOR EACH VIOLATION. If he was using Sheriff Dept./County owned machineguns & explosives to entertain his friends & family and not for duty use, then he’s guilty of theft of county property at a minimum. The good sheriff has been dirty for years, as was his late brother and father, and it would appear that the sheriff pushed the limits of legality just a bit too far this time and is getting ready to get his pee-pee slapped by his brothers in blue. Not a decade too late I say…
Thank you for this. You have over 3000 readers this morning in a very short time. EVERYONE knew and just did nothing. This is a silly crime, Jackie Gleason movie stuff. Thanks for reading.