Suspended NC sheriff had a pattern of corruption, vindictiveness, new court filing says

The recently suspended sheriff of Columbus County faces new allegations of corruption.

Jody Greene “has demonstrated on numerous occasions that he is willing to misuse the power and authority inherent to the office of sheriff for improper personal and political gain,” Jon David, the district attorney for Bladen, Brunswick and Columbus counties, wrote in a new court filing Friday.

Greene is scheduled to appear in court Monday for a hearing about whether he should be removed, not just suspended, from office. He was elected in 2018, becoming the county’s first Republican sheriff.

David’s initial petition to have Greene removed from office centered on a recorded phone call in which he called some African-American deputies “snakes” and “Black bastards.”

The new allegations in Friday’s filing include details gleaned from additional recorded phone calls.

In one recording, from the summer of 2020, Greene threatened to have a county commissioner who voted against a budget request arrested, David wrote.

Giles “Buddy” Byrd was subsequently arrested on felony charges, which a prosecutor later dropped after determining there was insufficient evidence. It was one of two allegedly malicious arrests described in David’s filing.

In the same call, recorded by then-county commissioner Edwin Russ, Greene threatened to summon OSHA, implying that an inspection from safety inspectors would lead to fines.

“They gonna spend some money I promise you,” Greene said in the recording, according to the petition. “When OSHA says that building is uninhabitable…and I got the stuff to do it with.”

To get to their next meeting, county commissioners would have to walk past a long line of uniformed deputies.

“This was another instance I felt was manufactured by Greene for the purpose of intimidating commissioners into voting in line with his requests,” Russ wrote in an affidavit.

Other recorded phone calls relate to a sexual relationship Greene allegedly had with a detective on his staff.

During one sexual encounter, the detective, Samanatha Hickman, kicked out the window of Greene’s county-issued Dodge Durango, according to an affidavit signed by a former deputy who worked closely with Hickman and recorded two of their phone calls.

Hickman told the former deputy, Victor Jacobs, that the she and Greene also had sex in his office, at a local shooting range and at his home in South Carolina, the affidavit states. Hickman became pregnant, Jacobs wrote. He later ran for sheriff in the Democratic primary.

David argued in the petition that the sexual relationship could cause widespread harm.

“Such a relationship may be the product of subtle or not-so-subtle coercion, may lead to favoritism for the subordinate, may undermine other employees’ morale, may undermine the organization’s reputation for fairness, may lead to retaliation suits, may embarrass the entity in public, and may, in other ways, impair the effective, non-biased functioning of the organization,” he wrote.

Greene’s supervision of employees came under additional scrutiny.

Deputies working in the jail failed to follow state procedures, and one incarcerated man was left with a serious brain injury after four others held in the jail beat him, David wrote.

Video shows that about 20 minutes passed before jail staff responded to the assault, according to the petition.

“A diverse cross-section of citizens from Columbus County have presented clear and convincing evidence that Defendant has engaged in long term and widespread conduct that evinces a pattern of racial discrimination, vindictiveness toward perceived political opponents, and maladministration in office,” David wrote.

Greene is seeking re-election this year and he continues to campaign. He faces Jason Soles, a former deputy in his office who is running as a Democrat. It was Soles who made Greene’s recorded comments about Black deputies public.

This story was originally published October 21, 2022 at 5:31 PM.