Among some hires by Durham sheriff: political ties, past firings
One member of the Durham County Sheriff’s Office was fired from the State Highway Patrol for lying and insubordination, and then booted from the Durham County Youth Home for sexually harassing a colleague.
Another was terminated from the City of Charlotte over his failure to perform the “core functions” of his job, a dismissal letter said. He reported a bachelor’s degree on his LinkedIn page that wasn’t confirmed by the college listed.
Two others who helped Sheriff Clarence Birkhead get elected show no prior experience with law enforcement agencies. Deputies discovered one had a convicted drug dealer who was dating her daughter staying in her home months after she was hired. The other had previously spent his career in real estate, property management and sales.
These are not rank-and-file hires in an office of roughly 485 that has dozens of vacancies. They are top administrators hired by Birkhead, a Democrat running for re-election this year, shortly after taking office in 2018.
Like all North Carolina sheriffs, Birkhead has power to hire who he wants. The state constitution gives sheriffs the latitude to hire and fire at will. A state Supreme Court decision in 2016 affirmed that sheriffs are constitutional officers with sole authority over their employees.
Due to the independence of sheriffs, county leaders don’t monitor or evaluate their job candidates.
Gary Cordner, a professor emeritus at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, said a city manager wouldn’t let a police chief hire people with spotty work histories or based on close personal ties. Richard Bennett, a professor at American University in Washington, D.C., called the hires “unwise decisions.”
The check, Bennett said, is the people who elect sheriffs.
“It’s up to the citizens of the County of Durham to determine whether that person should remain as sheriff or not,” Bennett said.
The N&O sought an explanation of the administrative hires and costs to the sheriff’s office from Birkhead. The sheriff declined to comment in a written statement, citing the state’s public records exemptions for personnel matters and criminal investigations.
“As you know, I am not at liberty to release or discuss matters that are associated with an employee’s personnel record or any criminal investigations,” Birkhead said.
That’s not true.
The personnel law gives agency heads such as Birkhead the discretion to provide information on employees, including why he hired them, under what is known as the integrity exemption.
The criminal investigation involving the search of a home belonging to Grace Marsh, Birkhead’s community relations director, is closed, which also gives Birkhead the discretion to talk about it.
Hiring allies
Two of Birkhead’s high-level hires played key roles in his campaign to be elected Durham County sheriff.
Marsh, 72, promoted Birkhead’s 2018 campaign on social media and made campaign appearances with him. A former longtime executive director of the Elna B. Spaulding Conflict Resolution Center, she is a member of two prominent Bull City political groups that endorsed Birkhead, the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People and the People’s Alliance.
Birkhead named Marsh director of community engagement. She makes $74,306 a year. In 2019, Durham County sheriff’s deputies executed a search warrant at Marsh’s home, part of an investigation involving a convicted felon who sometimes stayed at her residence.
Preston Edwards, 52, held a fundraiser for Birkhead, Marsh’s Facebook page showed, and he helped Birkhead win the endorsement of the Friends of Durham, the most conservative of Durham’s three prominent political groups, said David Smith, a former president. Edwards continues to register his real estate business with the state.
Birkhead named him chief of staff. He makes $131,127 a year.
Edwards and Marsh are seen working for Birkhead’s campaign in a documentary film, “The Sheriff,” that focused on two sheriff elections in 2018. Edwards is identified as Birkhead’s campaign manager; at one point in the documentary he stands in front of an organizational chart for the sheriff’s office and shows that he will be given a position just below the sheriff.
Tony Butler, the former trooper, was fired from the state highway patrol in 1993, patrol records show. He was fired by Durham County five years later after an investigation validated the sexual harassment complaint against him, county records show. Butler ran for sheriff in 2002, 2006 and 2010, news reports show.
Campaign records show an Anthony Butler donated $200 to Birkhead’s failed campaign in 2014, but the donor’s address wasn’t listed. Birkhead named Butler, 61, a major over the office’s support services. He makes $109,273 a year.
Birkhead hired Vincent Ritter to lead the office’s information technology team in 2019. Ritter was fired from the City of Charlotte in 2016 after less than two years on the job as an information technology business relationship manager, where he made $82,000 a year, Charlotte records show.
Last month on his LinkedIn page, Ritter, 59, listed an associate’s degree from Virginia College, a for-profit that went out of business in 2018 after losing its accreditation, and a bachelor’s degree in network management from Trinity College
His LinkedIn page did not give the location for Trinity College. The News & Observer checked Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, Trinity Washington University in the nation’s capital, and Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. None could find him in their records as having a degree.
When initially reached by a reporter in a phone call, Ritter said he would make himself available. He did not answer subsequent calls, and his LinkedIn page is no longer posted.
Birkhead named Ritter assistant director of information technology. He makes $100,531 a year. The positions for Marsh, Edwards and Ritter, as well as a communications director’s job given to David Bowser, 59, did not exist prior to Birkhead taking office.
Bowser makes $93,062 a year. He’s a former TV reporter in New Orleans who had worked in three public communications jobs in Louisiana and South Carolina prior to being hired.
The office has a senior public information specialist, AnnMarie Breen, who makes $74,988 a year, and an information technology manager position that pays $80,000 a year.
Nequella Battle, who had the information technology manager position for nearly six years before taking a private-sector job in November, said she has no idea why they hired Ritter as her boss. She didn’t see a need for one given the workload.
“When you figure that out you let me know,” Battle said in a phone interview. The sheriff’s office has hired a replacement for her.
Shortly after taking office, Birkhead won permission from the county manager’s office to reclassify four vacant lower-paying positions as administrative at an additional cost of $257,435 in pay and benefits, said Durham County Budget Director Keith Lane. The money came from nearly $3 million in lapsed salaries caused by 52 vacant positions, said Dawn Dudley, a county spokeswoman.
The county commissioners set the budget for the sheriff’s office. County leaders have no role in vetting who the sheriff hires, said Kathy R. Everett-Perry, the county’s chief employment counsel.
Commissioner Brenda Howerton, the current chairwoman, told a reporter he was “trying to create a story” by asking about them.
“I am not going to judge one way or the other,” she said. “The sheriff knows what his department needs. I don’t.”
Birkhead’s background
Birkhead spent much of his early career with Duke University Police, rising to lead the university force for seven years. Hillsborough hired him in 2005 to lead its police department, but he left after five years to unsuccessfully run for Orange County sheriff.
During the 2018 campaign for Durham County sheriff, Hillsborough Town Manager Eric Peterson criticized Birkhead. Peterson told the N&O that the department lost its law enforcement accreditation after Birkhead had left the department “in shambles.”
He resigned, Peterson said, as the town was looking into documents for the accreditation that turned out to have been backdated, something the accreditor said was not acceptable. Later that year, the town released emails to the N&O showing the employee responsible for the accreditation had been running a tax preparation business from the police office.
As sheriff, Birkhead has brought in at least three former Hillsborough officers to his force, including Robert “Brad” Whitted, who became his chief deputy making $136,591 a year, or nearly twice his annual pay when he retired as a Hillsborough lieutenant on Jan. 1, 2018.
Birkhead has also re-hired a former Durham County sheriff’s civilian employee, Miranda Reddish, 52, who had been fired in 2013. She is an accounting technician making $54,090 a year.
A county spreadsheet of her employment history the county provided to the N&O said in capital letters after she was terminated: “NOT ELIGIBLE FOR REHIRE.” No explanation was given.
News & Observer reporter Virginia Bridges and data reporter David Raynor contributed to this report.
This story was originally published February 11, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Among some hires by Durham sheriff: political ties, past firings."