Texas Rangers investigating allegations McLennan Co. Sheriff ordered deputy to work at his farm on taxpayers’ dime
Grand jury asked Rangers to investigate allegations Parnell McNamara ordered deputy to work at his farm while on county payroll
Published: Sep. 6, 2024 at 2:30 PM CDT|Updated: 43 minutes ago
WACO, Texas (KWTX) – The Texas Rangers have confirmed they are investigating reports that McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara improperly ordered a deputy to work at McNamara’s farm over a three-year period while the deputy was on the county payroll.
Department of Public Safety Sgt. Ryan Howard told KWTX that the Texas Rangers are investigating McNamara’s actions, but declined additional comment.
“The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Texas Rangers are investigating,” Howard wrote in an email. “As a department, it is crucial to preserve the integrity of the investigation. Releasing information in response to certain questions could potentially compromise the investigation.”
McLennan County District Attorney Josh Tetens forwarded a request to the Texas Rangers from the McLennan County grand jury in mid-August about reports that former deputy Johnathan Crawley worked at McNamara’s Bosqueville farm during his normal duty hours, clearing land for McNamara’s new home, mending fences and other jobs.
McNamara said last month that 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.
McNamara 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.”
Tetens said this week that he was contacted by Texas Ranger Bradley Freeman of the Ranger’s Public Corruption Unit in Austin. The Ranger acknowledged receipt of the grand jury request, which included a copy of an Aug. 12 KWTX story in which Crawley and other former sheriff’s office employees spoke publicly for the first time about McNamara ordering Crawley to work at the sheriff’s farm on county time, Tetens said.
Neither Freeman nor McNamara returned phone messages from KWTX on Friday.
According to the DPS website, the Public Corruption Unit is charged with enforcing public corruption “as it relates to public officials, law enforcement officers and others who hold a position of public trust.”
The Texas Ranger Public Integrity Unit, also housed in Austin, is similar in that it investigates crimes by state officers and state employees.
The request for the grand jury investigation came from Bernadette Feazell, a blogger and ex-wife of former McLennan County District Attorney Vic Feazell. She 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.
Tetens has said he will recuse his office from further involvement should the Rangers present his office with a potential case suitable for prosecution.
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 has 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 last month that 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 in mid-August 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.
As of Friday, no proposed MOU had been presented to County Judge Scott Felton’s office.
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 month.
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.
“The law is the law,” Perry said.
Copyright 2024 KWTX. All rights reserved.
A.C I agree with the majority of your comment, however what makes you qualified to comment on former deputies? Are you L.E.? Do you even know what that stands for BC it’s plain to see that you have absolutely no f@@@ing idea what any former employees went through. I personally know a lot of them did everything possible to change the environment to the point of being run off or quitting for trying to hold people accountable. So before you sit at your keyboard running your mouth about shit you know nothing about, how about you consider all the good officers that’s risked it all. But then again, you are the same person that had a derogatory comment about the Waco Police Dept. not being able to take care of the employee that tragically took his own life. So how bout you leave the cop shit to the cops and STFU!!!!!