SBI continues investigation into Pitt County drowning
GREENVILLE, N.C. — Seven months after state investigators concluded their probe into the 2005 drowning of the husband of a Pitt County sheriff’s deputy, officials have returned to assess the case again.The State Bureau of Investigation renewed its work on the case at the request of Pitt County District Attorney Clark Everett, said Jennifer Canada, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Justice. She declined to comment on the nature of the investigation.
Last week, family members of Stacey Dean Pollard filed a lawsuit alleging that his wife, Lt. Michelle Pollard, had affairs with two deputies and that the relationships hindered the investigation into his death.
Pitt County Sheriff Mac Manning strongly denied that two of his top officers had affairs with Michelle Pollard, 37, or that his office mishandled the case. Manning called the allegations “absolutely not true.”
“I’m confident our folks did their job as they were supposed to do it,” he said.
Manning said a sheriff’s investigation last year, along with an SBI investigation that concluded in December, determined Stacey Pollard’s death was an accident. An autopsy from 2005 determined Pollard drowned, possibly after a seizure. He had been an epileptic since his early teens.
Everett said his office was no longer involved but that the SBI agent who lead the investigation was asked to conduct follow-up interviews.
“When the agent came and delivered most of his information, there were some issues discussed that we wanted resolved,” Everett said. “We also talked to Pollard family members who had some information they wanted to discuss. I told them in the spring that there was insufficient evidence to rule this as anything but an accidental death.”
But Stacey Pollard’s family believes there was a cover-up.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Greenville, alleges that Michelle Pollard failed an SBI polygraph and later changed her account of her husband’s death.
She first told sheriff’s investigators that she found her husband’s body floating in the pool on Nov. 18, 2005, suspecting that he had a seizure and fell in the water, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit says she later told investigators that she surprised her husband by pushing him into the pool before running into their home, and returned later to find him floating in the water.
“My brother’s dead, and we don’t really know what happened that night,” said Lynn Pollard Sutton, Stacey Pollard’s sister. “There’s two versions. Is there a third?”
Manning said the SBI report contains a “plausible explanation” for the different accounts but declined to discuss it.
The lawsuit claims that two of the office’s top deputies hindered the investigation because of a romantic relationship with Michelle Pollard. The men have denied the allegations, though one of the deputies who is single briefly dated her several years ago when she was separated, Manning said.